"Engines Of Light - 01 - Cosmonaut Keep" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

Old programmers never die. They just move over to legacy systems.
They even look that way. Early adopters to the last, they don't pop telomere tabs and mitochondrial mixers like the rest of us -- no, they have to try out untried biotech, so they tend to look a bit patchy: gray skins-and-smooth beards sort of thing. Jadey, Jason, and I circle cautiously around the edge of a raucous, twenty-strong clot of the old villains, all quaffing beer and talking at the tops of their voices.
"What's with the fucking news?" someone's saying, shaking his head and blinking hard. "I can't get CNN, can't even get Slash-dot ... "
This particular clique aren't all programmers. Sometime half a century ago, back in the nineties, their social circle overlapped that of the Scottish literary intelligentsia. Neither group's fashion sense has exactly moved with the times. The writers wear variously distressed jackets in fake-prolo denim or fake-macho leather; the coders go more for multipocketed waistcoats laden with the hardware for hardware fixes -- Gerber and Leatherman multitools, Victorinox Swiss Army knives, Maglite torches, and over-faded trade-fair T-shirts: Sun, Bull, HP, Oracle, Microsoft ... This isn't irony, this is advertising -- not of the products or the companies (most of them long gone), but of the skills, not at all redundant, of hacking their legacy code.
I try to look respectful, like some fanboy at a con, but I don't respect this lot at all. The ruling Party considers them unreliable, but as far as I'm concerned this is just the CPEU being its usual stuffed-shirt self. Vaguely left-wing, precisely cynical, they affect a laid-back, ca'canny approval of the so-called "imported revolution" that followed our defeat in the war. It was their kind of crap attitude to quality control that let the Russkis past NATO's automated defenses in the first place.
On the other hand, if you want to hack Unix-based filing systems in dusty metal boxes in schools and hospitals and personnel departments all over the continental U.S., they'll get on your case without asking questions, especially if you pay in dollars. I zero in on Alasdair Curran, a tall nonagenarian with long white hair and boastfully black sideburns.
"The guy who trained me worked on LEO," he brags loudly, "and he was trained by a some spook who'd been at Bletchley Park, so I reckon -- "
"Yeah, Alec, and you're still shite!" someone else shouts.
As he rocks back in the general laughter Jadey catches his eye, and I take the opportunity to catch his ear. "Got a minute?"
"Oh, sure, Matt. What you after?"
"Well, I need an MS-DOS subbie -- "
Curran scowls, then jerks his thumb at one of his mates. "Tony's your man."
" -- and Jason needs somebody with a bit of early-dialect Oracle."
"Ah!" Curran brightens. "That, I can manage."
"We need it, like, now," Jadey tells him.
"Now?" He looks regretfully at his pint, then back at Jadey. She hits him with her best smile, and he has no defense. Hey, it makes my face warm, and I'm not even in the main beam.

Back to the quantum pool-room, but this time we don't even pretend to be playing. Curran boots up some clunky VR database manipulator, Jason sets up his card-table again, and I call up some of my software agents to handle the interface protocols and break the American firewalls.
I get the uncanniest sensation of pushing at an open door. Within moments Curran's up to his elbows in U.S. admin databases, Jason's slipping unlogged updates on Jadey's life story, and I'm keeping the one and only record of the changes and my AIs are booking the new ID an airline ticket.
We back out.
Jason passes Jadey a plastic card.
"That's the lot," he says. "Take it to any copyshop, they'll print and bind it for you. It'll even have the right bloodgroup stains."
I'm shaking my head. "Too bloody easy. It's like all the U.S. codes had been cracked ... "
"Shee-it," says Jadey.
Then I remember too. The English resistance network, unraveling.
"Uh-oh."
Curran's looking at us sharply as we move back to his lot's side of the room. "What's up?"
"Oh, nothing," I say hastily.
Then I notice that the whole place has gone quiet and everybody's watching the telly wall. There's that little jazzed-up flourish from "Ode to Joy" that precedes official announcements, and Big Uncle's face appears. CPEU General Secretary Gennady Yefrimovich normally looks appropriately avuncular, jovial, with an underlying solemnity. Right now he just looks insufferably smug.
"Comrades and friends," he begins, the translation and lip-synch software maxing his street-cred as usual in all the languages of the Community. For this particular nation and region, he comes across speaking English with a gravely Central Belt Scottish accent, which I know for a fact has been swiped from old tapes of the Communist trade-union leader and authentic working-class hero Mick Mac-Gahey. "I have an historic announcement to make. The exploration station of the European Space Agency, Marshall Titov, has made contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life within the asteroid 10049 Lora."
He pauses for a moment to let that sink in. As if from a great distance, I hear a dozen dropped glasses break, in various places in the pub. He smiles.
"Let me first assure you all that this is no cause for alarm. The alien intelligence is no threat to humanity. These organisms are extremely delicate, and would be vulnerable to attack or exploitation. It is fortunate for themselves and for us that their first encounter with humanity should be the peaceful explorers of the Socialist Democracies, and not commercial companies or military forces."
Something about the ironic slant of his bushy eyebrows gives the message that he's carefully not saying anything that might give offense to the imperialist exploiters, but that we all know whose companies and forces he has in mind.
"Needless to say, we warmly invite the closest cooperation with the scientific agencies of the entire world, including the United States. Great vistas of cooperation are opened up by this astonishing discovery. I now turn you over to the regular news for further details, and wish you well on this historic evening."
Sign-off, with another flourish of trumpets.
Fade to black, with something in the middle of the screen ... and then I recognize some of it and the scale of the rest of it hits me.
I've got chills like water's running down my back; every hair on my body is standing up, and I'm thinking this is the biggest news in human history, this day will be remembered forever. I'm staring at the wallscreen, transfixed like everybody else by the images from space; 10049 Lora looks like a lump of clinker, the space station a tiny filigree on its side. I manfully resist the rising impulse to give a nervous giggle.
"Aliens?" I hear myself squeak. Jadey turns around, almost spilling her pint, as everybody starts yelling at once. She drags me bodily away to a table, past old code-geeks whooping and cheering or, in some cases, just staring slack-mouthed with tears welling in their eyes.
"What?"
She's jammed in beside me in a corner bench, and she looks like it's only our mutually awkward position that's stopping her from slapping me. "Yeah, yeah," she says impatiently, "giant leap and all that, but -- "
In one section of screen the Russkis' prettiest newscaster is twittering brightly about "our heroic ESA cosmonauts" and "brilliant scientists"; in another, much smaller window, a reporter outside the European Parliament drones on about a new scandal, some Trot MEP exposed as taking a bigger wage from Washington, or possibly Langley. Any other time, it'd be the hottest item; now it just seems trivial and tawdry, literally mundane. Why are they running it at all?
"Will you fucking listen to me?" Jadey hisses. I blink and shake my gaze loose from the screen's hypnotic virtual grip, and focus on her face, tense and pale in the warm light.
"Okay. Sorry." Jesus. I can feel the urge to look back at the screen, like gravity.
"Matt, that ESA station, it's the one you got a job from today."
"Yes!" I say. "That's what's got me so gobsmacked, apart from the ... uh," -- I replay her cynical words -- " 'giant leap' stuff."
" 'Comrades, this is no accident,' " she flips back. She gives a quick, disdainful glance at the screen; I take this as permission to do the same. In the bottom corner there's a mug shot of Weber, then a clip of him being bundled into a black maria in Brussels, then a quick vox-pop with a shocked constituent on some street where sunshine glares on tin shacks and high-rises and palm trees.
"Where's that?" Jadey asks.
"French Guiana," I answer, unthinking.
"As in, famous for Kourou? That place where they have the other ESA launch-site?"