"Continuing Time - 04 - The AI War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

routine I ever saw.”
Trent shrugged. “Well, the important thing is that we enjoyed ourselves.”
Reverend Andy frowned. “No, the important thing is that we got the truth out of
that boy.”
Trent thought about it. “Well—that’s important, sure. But it’s more important
that we had a good time while we were doing it, without having to hurt him. In
the long run,” Trent said to Captain Bittan, “there’s only two reasons to ever
do anything: to enjoy yourself, and to help other people enjoy themselves.” He
lifted his helmet into place and sealed it shut while Sid Bittan was still
shaking her head.
“That man is crazy,” she said to Reverend Andy.
The huge black man said gently, “No, he’s just a holy man—a bodhisattva,” he
clarified; Bittan was a Buddhist. “They can be hard to deal with if you haven’t
known one before.”
Sid Bittan snorted; she’d never met a bodhisattva before, but she knew Trent
wasn’t one.
Trent clicked his outspeakers on. “Don’t talk about people in front of their
p-suits. It’s very impolite.”
“I was saying nice things about you,” Reverend Andy protested.
“Only because they’re true,” Trent said. “Only because they’re true.”




-2-
« ^ »
Trent and Reverend Andy took an unpressurized Chandler HuskySled back to Ceres
CityState. It had been an hour’s trip over to the Vatsayama, and was an hour
back; to conserve fuel, most of it was not under boost.
The Milky Way glowed directly in front of Trent as they approached Ceres, a
field of diamonds so bright they had color, blue and white and red and yellow
spread across black velvet, crossing Trent’s field of vision from end to end.
Ceres ballooned as they approached, from a small, pitted gray rock to a
landscape some 760 klicks in diameter that blotted out the sky. Trent, piloting
with his mind on other things, performed the maneuver automatically, going in
nose-first, braking rockets lit.
An encoded message was transmitted to Trent’s inskin when they were less than
eighty meters from Gandhi CityState’s Downlot 104. Ceres’ gravity is negligible;
for practical purposes it was a free fall approach. Trent disconnected a portion
of his attention from the approach and went Inside.
A simulation came alight: Captain Sidney Bittan, sitting in her chair on the
bridge of the Vatsayama, staring into the holo cameras. She fought to speak
against acceleration so fierce it pulled her cheeks back. “Trent!”
The nerve net in Trent’s skull had, a decade prior, been programmed with the
personality of Trent’s former Image, Johnny Johnny; today the pieces of Johnny
Johnny’s personality had largely been integrated by Trent. But the Image code
which Johnny Johnny had once used remained to him; it was a trivial matter for
Trent to assemble an Image of himself and beam it back to the Vatsayama. “Yes?”
Her voice was blurry from gee force. “After he decided we were really going to
let him live, ‘Sieur Clearmountain remembered something else he wanted to share