"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

“I can impregnate your slate with the information.”

“I don’t have a slate.”

She sighed, went to her desk, and returned with a rolled-up sheet of
something that felt stiff and somewhat like plastic. “Smooth this onto the
desktop. That’s right. Anywhere. Okay, it has picked up your signature by
touch. It contains about three thousand layers and each layer is a sheet of
molecules that are light or dark and will configure themselves to show you a
printed page.”

“And it will work even after this wears off ?”

“When it’s rolled up, just snap it against a hard surface and it will
activate.”

“All free.”

“This is nothing,” she said. “Just a taste. You’ll want to pay for the
rest. Now tell me what you need.”

I learned that most of the eye systems had backups. The artificial
persons who had them—and they were the most advanced—slept in
cocoonlike slings that lifted information from them through many interfaces,
so that the full, complex flavor of consciousness could be most fully
transferred. This information was sent to the backup, wherever it was kept.

Whomever Julia Quick was after—and I was no longer sure who that
might be—was in Frank Quick’s home safe.

I found the Quick accident in the police report. Julie’s mother and
sister were indeed seriously injured. She and her father were not.

Probing of the hospital records revealed that the entire family had
been taken away by ambulance and released into the care of their
physician, Dr. White.

But getting this information was the least of what happened to me
while I was there.

I walked out into the cold evening an hour later. Everything was sharp;
tightly focused; powerful. I felt as if previously I had not been alive.

No wonder people like Julia White could treat people like me with
such arrogance. She believed me to be a dolt, the perfect facilitator.

She had nearly been right.

When I returned to my office, she was pacing back and forth in front
of the door. She whirled and confronted me. “Where have you been?”