"Charles Stross - Escape" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

succeed, if this dump works -- and it can -- you'll have a whole new mobile Dreamtime; a starship
capable of carrying you out of this place. I can't allow that."

"Why not?" I ask; keep him talking ...

I can't let the bolter drift off-target. He'd have the control bay open like a clamshell. My fingers are slimy
where they grip the ceramic moulding of the one-shot. The Boss sounds increasingly raw: "You think you
have seen evil, but what you have seen is just a mirror of what humanity has inflicted on itself for milennia.
There is worse! Would you open the gates of Hell, plunging billions into terror just because the next
generation of Intelligence has transcended your petty comprehension? Would you fight your betters, for
having the temerity to exist? Oshi, you have lost. Your kind lost centuries ago, before they built the first
laboratory prototype of the Dreamtime. That I am here now is a sign of your defeat."

"Is that all?" I ask. It's so cold in here, my breath mists before me. But the coldest place in the room is
inside my heart.

Raisa opens her mouth, closes it again. She's bursting to say something, just bursting. And it is her.

"Is that the truth, Oshi?" she asks plaintively. "Is -- he -- telling the truth?" She glances at me, slightly
cross-eyed: trust me, she seems to be saying, smiling really serene, as if she knows that the dance
movement she's choreographing has only one possible ending ...

"It is," I say.

"Then -- I think I could have loved you --" She starts to twist round. Some kind of struggle is going on.
The powerknife curls towards the vital control racks, and -- forgive me -- I pull the trigger because the
Boss is determined, and I can see his target. (The front panel installation on the autopilot bay. Next to the
airlock controls.) And I can't justify that risk, no way -- not with eight hundred million lives at stake.

I think Raisa's occulted completely, her personality driven under by the force of his will. It makes no
difference, because the outcome is the same. One body, one death. It's a big SPLAT noise: it thumps my
ears as it sprays blood everywhere, just like a sack of juice dropped out of a tenth-story window onto
white sunbleached concrete, and it's not even human, really, not so you'd recognize it afterwards.

Everything is grainy and black and glistening and my forehead is wet and my ears are ringing and I can't
see too well. There's water or something in my eyes. Upload is impossible; the white noise in my wisdom
interface roars on and on forever, a nation in flight to their new home. Raisa is dead. She won't be joining
them, now or ever. I feel like a hollow statue, just a shell really, not human any more. I've been trying to
get there for years, somewhere safe from trauma, somewhere where they won't keep dragging me
through hell, only now I've found it I don't want it. Because I need to hurt. I don't want to feel this ...
absence. I want to hurt. Raisa: I don't know whether I was obsessed with you because the Boss was
deviously diddling my responses, or because I really meant it. But now I'll never have a chance to say
what I wanted to say, which was mainly, "I want to love you". It's all over again, the way it always ends.
They put me together and send me out again and I kid myself that this time will be different, but it never
is. I'm the scratch monkey: use it like a scratch pad, throw it away, or maybe fix it up and use it again 'til
it breaks. I've had enough. All the pain is boiling up, demanding recognition.

I'm holding the power knife. I look at it, carefully switch off the vibrator so it won't do any real damage,
and hold it real close. It's shimmery, kind of pretty in a sort of gunmetal way. The handle is slick with shit
stitched through with blood. Raisa, why did you do it? Did you know something you never told me? Or