"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 02 - Greenhouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

He pointed to a small bump on the skin beside the hunger patch. "That's
the control node. Try squeezing it." When she obeyed, the Slugabed fell away
from her body and lay flat, quiet and passive, a mere mattress.

"Oh!" she said. She squeezed the node again, and the genimal once more
molded itself to her.

"If you squeeze harder," said Tom, "it'll massage you."

"Can you squeeze too hard?"

"The instructions warn against trying. It tries to scale its response to
your command, and..."

She was ignoring his answer. She forced the living mattress flat with her
hands, rolled on it, patted it, stroked it. "They don't come with fur, do
they?" He shook his head, thinking to himself that fur would make feeding a
messy business. She rolled over again and pressed her face into the Slugabed's
surface. Then, finally, she sat up and said, "I think I'll take it. You do
deliver?"

The Slugabed display was near the back of the store. After Tom Cross had
written up the sale and arranged for delivery, he fetched a basket of apples
and a bottle of nutrient spray from the nearby supply room. He was a salesman,
but among his duties he also counted the chore of feeding the inventory.

The spray was for the Slugabeds, and it took him only minutes to
distribute their rations. The apples were for the garbage disposals that sat
in a row near the wall, held erect by U-shaped brackets. Each of the
gengineered pigs had a barrel-shaped body, stubby, nearly vestigial limbs, and
a blunt snout that pointed toward the ceiling. Once it was installed in a
customer's kitchen, the drainpipe from the sink would empty into its mouth and
throat. It would then chew up whatever chunks the owner chose to putdown the
drain, extracting nutrient as necessary. The residues--solid and liquid--would
pass through the genimal and into a second pipe. Here, in the Garden, the
garbage disposals were connected only to the outlet pipes, short stubs that
jutted upward from a larger pipe that ran beneath their row. Water ran
continuously through this pipe. Odor was limited to the animal fragrance of
the genimals' bodies.

Tom stuffed an apple into each pig's mouth. When the grinding noises had
quieted, he gave the larger models a second helping. Then, the basket still in
his hands, he made his rounds of the store, gathering overripe pie plant and
sammitch bush fruits, withered goldfish blooms, yellowed leaves, and other
organic garbage. He could feed it all to the pigs, he knew, and sometimes he
did. But the Garden also stocked litterbugs. They were street and yard
cleaners, designed to process huge quantities of dung and other litter, and
all he had to do was dump the basket's contents before them. Their shovel jaws
made short work of his gleanings. When they were done, he scattered
walnut-sized feed pellets on the floor of their pen. The store simply didn't