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

--"

"Can't move. I'm still too ill. I'd be dead but for the nanosystems glueing my cells
together."

"But you're --"

"A medic, or what passes for one here. I know best. Oshi? I'll have to wait. Take my
chances with the tapeworm. It's very subtle, you know. Assimilates predator tactics,
memes, as well as genes from its victims. But it doesn't know everything." An expression
of loathing or disgust twisted her face and she shut her eyes. "Oshi?"

"Yes?" Oshi took a step closer, until she could feel Raisa's breath on her cheek.

"Kiss me --" She tilted her face up towards Oshi, pursed slack bruised lips. Oshi
instinctively leaned close, smelt something through her oloreceptors, jerked back and
looked ...

Raisa's mouth hung open. There were no teeth inside: she no longer had a tongue. Her
mouth was full of pale wormy palps, questing heads blindly seeking the warmth of human
breath: "Oshi? Kiss me?"

Oshi looked at the support hammock, then at the ground beneath it. The floor was humped
up, cracked open, something vegetable thrusting through and up into the mass of life
support equipment that cradled Raisa. It smelt of shit and decaying vegetables and worms.
The thing at the centre of the mass twitched, pulsing in time to the motion of Raisa's rib
cage like the arm below a glove puppet.

"Upload," said Oshi: "shit!" She scrambled back, covering her face with one hand, trying
not to vomit. "If that's still you, Raisa, evacuate; go Dreamtime at once!"

"What's wrong? Oshi, I feel strange --" Raisa opened her eyes and screamed.

Her body heaved itself upright, shedding wires and support tubes like dandruff. A fat
white cable impaled her from below: her eyes bulged and when she opened her mouth
something like spaghetti spewed writhing and twitching across her chin. Tears of blood
trickled down her cheeks as wormy pseudopods erupted from her eyes and ears. She
glided forward, thrusting atop a thick body that slithered snake-like across the floor.


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4: Will you still love me ...


Oshi reacted instantly. She threw up her ghost arms: a mess of tracking digits splashed
across the room, the tapeworm, the gutted puppet impaled upon it. She made one spastic
twitch and there was a noise like a giant zip fastening lined with firecrackers. Shrapnel
sang and pinged across the room. The world outside the medicentre screamed: the floor
shook as the various extrusions of the tapeworm registered the pain of this extension.