"Charles Stross - Love me" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

An inchoate mass of worries caught her up and made her heart thud between her ribs.
Anticipation: a cute body, a woman who'd stirred an unexpected lust in her. Still alive
somewhere. Fear: I'm going to have to die and upload before this is over. Hope the Boss
isn't waiting for me on the other side. Paranoia: what if Anubis left an insurance policy, a
time-bomb? A zombie programmed for revenge, concealed among eightly million minds
in a nation-sized shell game. Excitement: we're going to hijack a starship! And finally,

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4: Will you still love me ...

something approximating remorse. Maybe this is my chance to set the tables right without
killing anyone ...

Why can't there be peace, for once? she wondered. Individuals who stood out from the
crowd; they all succumbed to love or bullets eventually. Ivan, Anubis, Marat Hree -- they
all coexisted in her minds eye. Suddenly she felt the ashy, grey futility of it, with an acuity
born of despair: her years of dancing to the Superbright's song. How much longer will I
have to feel this guilt? she wondered. What if I've made a terrible mistake? She shook her
head, half-blinded by tears. It was a heavy burden, finally bearing responsibility for her
own actions. She straightened up and reached for the rim, letting the tub drain and clean
itself unattended. I wonder if this is what Boris meant; never quite being sure if you're
doing the right thing. Alone and very much aware of it, the last of the heroes dried herself
and covered her nakedness before she went outside to face an uncertain future.

Nightfall was the time of the small blinding. It always reminded Oshi of her own human
weakness. Now, an evening later, she looked at the ceiling and wondered whether she was
ready to face the darkness in her heart. She felt drained. Wisdom was still mostly off-line,
as were all comms in and out of the Redoubt. A sour cloud of discarded ration wrappers
floated behind her -- she couldn't be bothered to collect them. Leave it to the drones. She
felt slightly sick, but not from free-fall vertigo. The toilet facilities ran on a centrifugal-
suction system, otherwise she might have seen the blood in her stools.

She suited up, letting her climb-spider lock itself into place around her and jack into her
spinal reflexes. It felt eerie to own ghost limbs again, two arms poised behind her to sting
machine death into anything that got in her way. She burrowed into the body-bag she'd
had the axial factory prepare, forcing herself to breathe steadily despite the polythene
claustrophobia wrapped all around her. It was an impermeable membrane, transparent,
tough and airtight. Not a space-suit; an environmental precaution. There was no telling
what the tapeworm could have grown into with six days of unsupervised ontological
recombination.

Oshi wanted to get out very badly. She'd woken up eight hours ago from a dream of
nameless terror and realised what was going on. Days of enclosure weighed her down; the
thought of what was to come was even worse. There was one critical part to her plan, that
Boris hadn't even alluded to: retreiving the gatecoder from the colony medicentre. It
wasn't a standard inventory component, and the construction schematics for it weren't part
of the general database she had. If she couldn't find it she might as well cut her wrists now
and get things over with, rather than wait for the Ultrabright death machine to download
the mind of its master program and go to work on the colony. When she charged up her