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

the study. That meant Mick sitting at a table, without the glasses, being
asked to hold various objects and decide what shape they were and what
they were made of. He scored excellently, only failing to distinguish
between wood and plastic balls of similar weight and texture. Flint was
cheerfully casual around him, without any of the affectedness or
oversensitivity Mick had quickly detected in his friends or colleagues.
Clearly she didn’t know what had happened; she just thought Joe had opted
to go for a different test subject than himself.

Joe was upbeat about Mick’s progress. Everything, from the host
body to the hardware, was holding up well. The bandwidth was stable at
nearly two megabytes per second, more than enough spare capacity to
permit Mick the use of a second video feed to peer back into the version of
the lab on the other side. The other version of Joe held the cam up so that
Mick could see his own body, reclining on the heavy-duty immersion couch.
Mick had expected to be disturbed by that, but the whole experience turned
out to be oddly banal, like replaying a home movie.

When they were done with the tests, Joe walked Mick over to the
university canteen, where he ate a liquid breakfast, slurping down three
containers of fruit yoghurt. While he ate—which was tricky, but another of
the things that was supposed to get easier with practice—he gazed
distractedly at the television in the canteen. The wall-sized screen was
running through the morning news, with the sound turned down. At the
moment the screen was showing grainy footage of the Polish miners,
caught on surveillance camera as they trudged into the low, concrete
pithead building on their way to work. The cave-in had happened three days
ago. The miners were still trapped underground, in all the world-lines that
were in contact with this one, including Mick’s own.

“Poor fuckers,” Joe said, looking up from a draft paper he was
penciling remarks over.

“Maybe they’ll get them out.”

“Aye. Maybe. Wouldn’t fancy my chances down there, though.”

The picture changed to a summary of football scores. Again, most of
the games had ended in identical results across the contacted worldlines,
but two or three—highlighted in sidebars, with analysis text ticking below
them—had ended differently, with one team even being dropped from the
rankings.

Afterward Mick walked on his own to the tram stop and caught the
next service into the city center. Already he could feel that he was attracting
less attention than the day before. He still moved a little stiffly, he could tell
that just by looking at his reflection in the glass as he boarded the tram, but
there was no longer anything comical or robotic about it. He just looked like
someone with a touch of arthritis, or someone who’d been overdoing it in
the gym and was now paying with a dose of sore muscles.