"Stephen Kraus - White Walls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kraus Stephen)

Her security robot paced them, squealing slightly. Its camera head swiveled.

“We have to keep particulates down. We can’t give dust anywhere to
collect.”

“Why do you all care so much about dust?”

No one had ever asked him that. It took a minute to remember why. “We do a
lot of silicon fabrication. We carve depressions in wafer surfaces the size of
individual molecules. Can’t let any particles settle. A dust grain looks like an asteroid
at our scale.”
 She pointed at the bare walls. “But does it have to be like this everywhere?”

He stopped walking. The corridor narrowed to a vanishing point ahead of
them. “No, not really. We’ve gotten a little compulsive about it.”

“You keep saying we. All of you?”

“No. The director sets the policies. He takes a . . . special interest in the air
quality in the lab.”

“The director again.” She closed her eyes. “He scarcely seems human. He
told me that I’d be naked in that . . . that robotics lab, or whatever it is.”

Jacobson shook his head. “That wouldn’t make sense. You need a contrast
between the laser reflectors and the background.”

“Was he being cruel or just ignorant?”

The security robot rocked back and forth impatiently. Jacobson started
walking again.

“Let’s talk about something else.”

She sighed. “What else can he do to me?”

Jacobson thought about that. He’d contrived a sort of life for himself here,
between the white walls — a compromise, but what wasn’t? He could imagine worse
places, worse situations. No problem at all doing that.

He spoke carefully: “I’ve stopped trying to guess what the director is likely to
do.”

She smiled faintly beneath her mask and moved beside him. Their shoulders
touched every few steps. He shivered with each contact.

“You’re building war machines here, aren’t you? That’s what your robots
are.”