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

as if preventing some kind of physical (albeit unplanned) rendezvous.

“I hate this,” she said. “EISH got to him.”

EISH was short for the Everyone Is Someone’s Hero Society, with the last
“s” dropped because EISHS was too hard to say. If Edith had been running the
Society, she would have given it another acronym altogether because EISH sounded
too much like “ish” for her tastes.

“I don’t know how EISH got in,” Conrad said. “I’ve added more secure
equipment to this room than any other place in the building. We even have guards
posted outside—real, living, breathing guards—just so that no strangers get inside
the elevators coming up to the seventeenth floor.”

Edith shrugged. “He screamed, then came out at top speed to tell me about
his grandfather and a plastic pony, and how that made him the man he is today.”

Conrad sighed. “Sounds like EISH.”

He leaned against the desk and crossed his arms. He stared at the information
still scrolling on the wall across from him, but he clearly wasn’t seeing it.

Edith sank into the chair. It felt comfortable, familiar, as if she had come
home. Here she didn’t feel quite as heavy; here she didn’t feel quite as useless or out
of date.

She sprang up.
 “Check the chair,” she said.

“They did chairs two years ago. They’re not going to—”

“Check the chair.”

He sighed a second time—what other response could they all have to EISH
but sigh?—and crouched. While he worked, Edith paced.

Technically, EISH wasn’t her responsibility. The Brass was supposed to
monitor EISH and all other like-minded groups. There were divisions that handled
anti-EISH spin; divisions that persecuted EISH members to the full extent of the law;
and, it was rumored, divisions that sent EISH members into the database earlier than
they deserved to go.

But technically, Actuarial Engineers were supposed to prevent database
tampering. Even though it was against the company’s best interest, Actuarial
Engineers were supposed to double-check suspicious information—especially
information provided about a hated person or a person who belonged to a hated
organization (like EISH). This protected the corporation from class action lawsuits,
too much government oversight, and the occasional overzealous
politician/prosecutor/investigative reporter.