"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Crunchers, Inc." - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Almost as if he’d known he wouldn’t last.

She shook off the paranoia and looked at the accounts while she waited for
Conrad. Conrad always ran ten minutes late, except when he was fifteen minutes
early. It was almost as if he couldn’t decide who he was.

She knew who he was. He was a relatively young man with too much
responsibility. Conrad was in charge of all of the security on the seventeenth
floor—a daunting task, considering the amount of information that flowed through
this place.

Public records, bank records, arrest records, personal complaints, grades,
salaries, family size, and any other information that someone—anyone, not just the
subject—chose to share. People could (and often did) send false information on
someone they hated; if the sender got caught, the information went into the sender’s
file—one of those horrible black marks that Edith feared.

She constantly checked her records and saw only the two legitimate
marks—the middle-management position (and no sign of ambition for a higher place
in society) and the childlessness, which could be a plus if her ambition grew. Only
she didn’t know how to grow ambition. She’d already come a long way. Her mother
had been a homemaker in the days when homemakers were shunned as
retro-women, and her father, an Iraqi war veteran, never really got over his period of
service—moving from job to job to job, each with less pay and less responsibility.

That she managed to rise this high—and stay here—was a bloody miracle if
she said so herself, and she did, although not as often as she could have (fearing that
someone would report her for repetitious behavior or vainglory or some other minor
sin that could besmirch her record if too many people reported disliking her).

“Edie?”
 She jumped, even though she recognized the voice as belonging to Conrad.
He was one of the few people in the world who called her Edie.

She turned, hand against her beating heart, glad for the cover of her fear. He
always made her heart beat faster. He was six feet tall, broadshouldered, and strong
featured. He had a classic twentieth century handsomeness—the kind you saw on
war recruitment posters during World War II (her area of expertise in college, all
those years ago)—and his voice, a rumbling baritone, seemed to match it.

A few of the women said he was too perfect, suspecting him of abusing
enhancements to improve his physical appearance (even in this day and age, women
were supposed to do anything they could to improve their physical appearance, but
men should abstain for fear of focusing too much on good looks over character).
Edith believed he was one of the few humans on the planet born with his incredible
good looks. No matter how much she stared at him (and she stared at him too
much), she couldn’t see evidence of any surgical procedure, nano or otherwise.

“You seem jumpy.” He came all the way into the office, and closed the door.
Something in his movement jarred the wall system and both glass-shutters opened,