"Joe Haldeman - Four Short Novels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

scheme to gather what passed for wealth.
Sooner or later, though, everyone tried it. Most who tried it for one year went back for ten
or a hundred, or, eventually, forever. After some centuries, permanent dicuths began to outnumber
humans — though those humans were not anything you would recognize as people, crushed as they were
by nearly a thousand years of wisdom and experience. And jealous of those who had given up.
On 31 December, A.D. 3000, the last “normal” person surrendered his loneliness for dicuth
bliss. The world was populated completely by total innocents, tended by patient machines.
It lasted a long time. Then one by one, the machines broke down.

Crime and Punishment


EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO PASS that no one ever had to die, unless they were so horrible that
society had to dispose of them. Other than the occasional horrible person, the world was in an


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idyllic state, everyone living as long as they wanted to, doing what they wanted to do.
This is how things got back to normal.
People gained immortality by making copies of themselves, farlies, which were kept in safe
places and updated periodically. So if you got run over by a truck or hit by a meteorite, your
farlie would sense this and automatically pop out and take over, after prudently making a farlie
of itself. Upon that temporary death, you would lose only the weeks or months that had gone by
since your last update.
That made it difficult to deal with criminals. If someone was so horrible that society had to
hang or shoot or electrocute or inject him to death, his farlie would crop up somewhere, still bad
to the bone, make a farlie of itself, and go off on another rampage. If you put him in jail for
the rest of his life, he would eventually die, but then his evil farlie would leap out, full of
youthful vigor and nasty intent.
Ultimately, if society felt you were too horrible to live, it would take preemptive action:
check out your farlie and destroy it first. If it could be found. Really bad people became adept
at hiding their farlies. Inevitably, people who were really good at being really bad became master
criminals. It was that, or die forever. There were only a few dozen of them, but they moved
through the world like neutrinos: effortless, unstoppable, invisible.
One of them was a man named Bad Billy Beerbreath. He started the ultimate crime wave.
There were Farlie Centers where you would go to update your farlie — one hundred of them, all
over the world — and that’s where almost everybody kept their farlies stored. But you could
actually put a farlie anywhere, if you got together enough liquid nitrogen and terabytes of
storage and kept them in a cool dry place out of direct sunlight.
Most people didn’t know this; in fact, it was forbidden knowledge. Nobody knew how to make
Farlie Centers anymore, either. They were all built during the lifetime of Joao Farlie, who had
wandered off with the blueprints after deciding not to make a copy of himself, himself.
Bad Billy Beerbreath decided to make it his business to trash Farlie Centers. In its way, this
was worse than murder, because if a client died before he or she found out about it, and hadn’t
been able to make a new farlie (which took weeks) — he or she would die for real, kaput, out of
the picture. It was a crime beyond crime. Just thinking about this gave Bad Billy an acute
pleasure akin to a hundred orgasms.
Because there were a hundred Bad Billy Beerbreaths.