"Thomas A. Easton - Silicon Karma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

"You were working for me."

"I know that much." It had been over a week since Ada had appeared in
his apartment to say she needed his help. The currency of the virtual
world was the raw material of computerized imagination. Every resident
had the same basic ration of memory and processing capacity, just enough
to let them restore their youth and imagine the necessary paraphernalia
of daily life. If they wanted more--larger quarters, private worlds,
elaborate self-transformations--they had to earn more memory and
processing capacity, or "data energy." Most just called it money. To
earn what they needed to fuel their imaginations, some pretended to be
artificially intelligent software for an outside world that preferred to
have no overt contact with the ghosts in the Coleridge machine. Some
sold their imaginings of food or sex or fashion to their fellow
residents. One popular product for those with programming skills was the
image-transformation routines necessary to strip the years away from
one's age of entry, or to grow fur or tails, or to make other changes.
And some cheated. "I have heard," Ada had said. "That some of my guests
have disappeared."

"Why don't you just reboot them?"

The computer's representation shook her head. "They're not dead. They
haven't really vanished. They're still around. That much I know. But
none of their friends have seen them, and they don't answer calls."

"If they're still around, you could force them to answer. Or pick them
up and drop them in the same room as those friends."

"You know I can't do that. I can't interfere." He had sighed, and when
she had added, "Would you look into it?" he had agreed. Now he could
only shrug. "I must have been close, but ..."

The memory just wasn't there. "Then you'll have to start over."

"Not quite." His memory was fine, up to his last B-cup three days
before. He had only three days of investigation to repeat. And then, if
whatever he had found before could still be found, if it had not been
hidden or destroyed, he would know why he had been murdered. He
suspected that he would also have fulfilled the mission Ada had handed
him. "Did they have anything in common?"

"Several of them had recently bought custom image transformation
routines from the Image Shop."

"Then there's a place to start." # The Coleridge Corporation occupied
the twenty-sixth through the thirty-first floors of the forty-story
building it owned in the heart of the city. The executive boardroom was
on the uppermost of these floors, its broad expanse of glass looking out