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

she moved every available food container into the core's forward storage area.

Taking stock was heavy work and left her wrung out, damp as a discarded towel. She
spent two days at it without any real rest -- a time came, some ages after she had
experienced her moment of enlightenment in the factory, when she had to relax. She
forced herself to leave off the audit, and made her way to the bathroom: she waited
impatiently while the compact cubicle filled with hot water sweated through porous
ceramic walls. Staying awake without any set task in mind was an effort. When the zero-
gee tub was full she donned a breather mask and sank gratefully into the water, letting it
suck her towards the centre of a pale blue bubble that might have been metres or light-
years in diameter. Her vision dimmed then cleared into a view of somewhere else --

Interfacial manifestation. Please hold.

" What's going on?" she demanded, heart pounding with sudden terror. Paranoid fears
struck her; a vision of her body put to asleep in the bath by remote control, some devious
afterthought of Anubis: don't let this be so ...

Incoming communiction: point of origin Pascal Dreamtime.


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20loveme%20(ss).html (9 of 41)4-7-2007 2:25:53
4: Will you still love me ...



The ocean trench cleared to a stratospheric blue. There was no visible floor; it was a total
void on all sides. A flat planar surface appeared beneath her, flashed away in all directions
even as she realised it was there. Her guts loosened with anticipation; she tried to access
her wisdom but found it obscurely slow. Of course, she realised, this is all happening via
downlink. Something had locked into her senses, feeding a virtual reality straight into her
brain. The terror redoubled; that was a security function! Final control of violent cases.

"Come on, Boris!" she yelled into the emptiness. Then she was no longer alone. Boris
stood facing her.

"No need to panic," he said. "How's the world doing?"

Oshi glared. "How do you think? Why are you doing this?"

"I wanted a private channel," he said. A mild-mannered shrug, subtly self-satisfied: "this
seemed the best way."

"Best way, shit!" Oshi turned away to conceal the shaking of her shoulders. "You know
what I thought when I blanked out?" Agitation lent a veneer of immediacy to the scene
around her.

Boris looked annoyed. "Go easy! We're only just waking up out there. There's a delay, by
the way. Notice anything? A gap whenever I speak?"