"Alastair Reynolds - Signal to Noise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

head. The couch tilted up, and he was able to get off and stand on his feet.

Mick touched the back of his neck, came away with a tiny smear of
blood on his thumb.

“That’s it?”

“I told you there was nothing to it,” Joe said, putting down a
motorcycling magazine. “I don’t know what you were so worried about.”

“It’s not the nervelink operation itself I don’t approve of. I don’t have a
problem with the technology. It’s the whole system, the way it encourages
the exploitation of the poor.”

Joe tut-tutted. “Bloody Guardian readers. It was you lot who got the
bloody moratorium against air travel enacted in the first place. Next you’ll be
telling us we can’t even walk anywhere.”

The nurse swabbed Mick’s wound and applied a bandage. He was
shunted into an adjoining room and asked to wait again. More tests
followed. As the system interrogated the newly embedded nervelink, he
experienced mild electrical tingles and strange, fleeting feelings of
dislocation. Nothing he reported gave the staff any cause for alarm.

After Mick’s discharge from the medical center, Joe took him straight
down to the laboratory. An electromagnetically shielded annex contained
the couch Joe intended to use for the experiment. It was a modified version
of the kind tourists used for long-term nervelinking, with facilities for
administering nutrition and collecting bodily waste. No one liked to dwell too
much on those details, but there was no way around it if you wanted to stay
nervelinked for more than a few hours. Gamers had been putting up with
similar indignities for decades.

Once Mick was plumbed in, Joe settled a pair of specially designed
immersion glasses over his eyes, after first applying a salve to Mick’s skin
to protect against pressure sores. The glasses fit very tightly, blocking out
Mick’s view of the lab. All he could see was a gray-green void, with a few
meaningless red digits to the right side of his visual field.

“Comfortable?” Joe asked.

“I can’t see anything yet.”

“You will.”

Joe went back into the main part of the basement to check on the
correlation. It seemed that he was gone a long time. When he heard Joe
return, Mick half-expected bad news—that the link had collapsed, or some
necessary piece of technology had broken down. Privately, he would not
have been too sorry were that the case. In his shocked state of mind in the