"Stephen Golden - Last Ghost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

"Please!" she begged him. Hysteria edged her voice. "Tell me!"

Through mists that swirled down dusty corridors of memory, the words
came out unbidden. "You are dead."

"No! That's impossible! I can't be!"

Loud silence.

"I can't be," she repeated. "Death was conquered more than five
thousand years ago. After our minds were transferred into computer
banks, we became immortal. Our bodies may fail, but our minds go on.
Nobody dies anymore . . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"You are dead," he repeated emotionlessly.

"Are . . . are you a ghost?" she asked.

Though the meaning of the word had been stolen from him, that shred
of identity remained: "Yes."

She brooded, and large quantities of non-time elapsed. He waited. He
became accustomed to her existence. No longer was she an alien thing
in his empty universe. She was now a half presence, and he accepted
her as he had come to accept everything else-without comment.

"I suppose," she said at last, "some sort of equipment failure might
have temporarily dislodged my personality pattern from the memory
banks. But only temporarily. I'm only half dead so far. As soon as the
trouble is fixed, I'll be all right again. I will be all right, won't I?"

' He didn't answer. He knew nothing about equipment failures --or had
forgotten if he ever had known.

"Equipment failures are supposed to be impossible," she prattled on,
trying desperately to convince herself that her comfortable reality
would return again. "Still, in thousands of years even a trillion-to-one
shot might happen. But they'll fix it soon. They've got to. They must.
Won't they? Won't they?"

She stared at her impassive companion with non-eyes widened by
panic. "Don't just stand there! Help me!"

Help. That word found a niche somewhere in the haunted cavern of his
mind. He was supposed to help . . . to help . . .

The who, or what, or how he was supposed to help eluded him. That is,
if he had ever known.

They drifted on through the void together, side by side, ghost and