"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Coolhunting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

identification number, and working resident identification number. Following
that was a retinal scan (she wondered how Leo had gotten around that one) and
a left thumbprint match.
Most of the questions she subverted as well. She hadn't typed her
personal numbers in nearly fifteen years. She couldn't remember her resident
number, and she didn't have a working resident number. Even if she did, she
wouldn't have given it up. She liked her privacy, and required it for the most
part so that she could do her job. Her on-line identities were multiple and
clear to her: her real one was lost in the haze of memory.
When she found the hidden message, the machine gave her an instant
hardcopy. She wondered if it had done that for Leo, as well. Only he wouldn't
have understood the message.
_KD dying. Wants to see you. come back. You don't have to talk to us. But see
her this one last time._
We hired several detectives and a bounty hunter. The detectives
couldn't locate you. The hunter did but would not give your location. He did,
however, volunteer to deliver this chip.
We would have included a pre-paid ticket on a same hour shuttle, but we
don't know your city of origin. We are still willing to pay your way home.
Nothing has changed here. You know where to find us.
There was no signature. There didn't need to be. She recognized her
father's abrupt tones in the words. Amazing how deep those memories went, how
deep the effect of the lives that first touched hers. She hadn't spoken to her
father in years, and yet she could still hear his voice in her mind, feel his
presence as clearly as if she had left him yesterday.
She logged off, closed the laptop and ripped up the hardcopy, stuffing
the pieces into her nip pouch for later disposal. Then she closed her eyes and
leaned her head back, wishing her life could be as simple as it had been only
ten hours ago.
"Are you all right?" the waitress asked in Mandarin.
"Fine," Steffie replied in the same language. Then she sipped the rest
of her tea, paid with unmarked plastic, grabbed the laptop, and left.
****
She took the first shuttle she could grab. It departed from the rooftop pad at
63rd and Lex an hour after she left the restaurant. It had taken her nearly as
long to get to the pad as it would take her to get to Ann Arbor.
It had been ten years since she'd been outside of Manhattan. Ten years
since she'd arrived, fresh from Austin, then the cool-hunting capital of the
country. She'd arrived with a few credentials and a lot of balls, ready to
take the plunge that most hunters fail:
Staking out her own hunting grounds, making her place the secret center
of cool.
Austin lost its spot because everyone knew that coolness originated
there. So early adapters arrived, followed by the trend-followers, and the
cool-wanna-bes. Inundated by copycats, hunters, and wanna-bes, the truly cool
left, and it took hunters almost a year to find the next center.
Phoenix.
Only no one advertised it.
Steffie didn't want to follow the cool ones. She wanted to find them.
So she had come here, figuring that many of the cool were among the poor and