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

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4: Will you still love me ...

containing a fragile harvest of slime-smeared human bones. She recoiled, taking in
everything with obsessive intensity. What -- she thought, then looked up. At the artefact in
the centre of the room.

"Hello Oshi," said the thing in the life-support bush. "Small world, isn't it?"

Six days had turned Raisa into a shell; a rotting chrysalis within which nothing but a core
of personality remained. She'd taken a cumulative dose of decaGreys: what was left of her
body was held together by the frond-like peripherals of the life support system. Her skin
was blotched and bruised and peeling, her hair moulting; she looked like a week-dead
corpse.

"You took your time getting here," she said drily.

Oshi blanched. "I thought you were uploaded." For a moment her shell cracked; she
looked at Raisa with eyes like broken glass.

"Sort-of: I had to stay," Raisa said. Her throat crackled with mucus as the speech-synth
vocalised for her, her injured pharynx vainly trying to keep up with her brain. "Rest
evacuated ... we all uploaded. But I wanted to talk to you."

Oshi glanced down. A mess of decaying skin and bones -- all that was left of a goon -- lay
before Raisa's support hammock.

"A little contretemps," Raisa said tiredly. "Not everyone made it. The goon squad went
crazy. You know about them?"

Oshi looked at her dully. Slowly her face relaxed. One cheek twitched into a self-
deprecating grin. "So you decided to stay for a little chat, right? If the radiation level here
is so intense, what's going to happen on Pascal?" She turned away as if embarrassed,
trying to conceal her reaction. Shoulders shaking. She really had thought that maybe --

"I wanted to talk to you."

Oshi turned round slowly. "About what?"

"I think you know."

"You didn't have to stay." The air between them was gravid with tension.

"Ah, but I wanted to. I really -- you didn't give me enough time."


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4: Will you still love me ...