"Charles Stross - Message in a Time Capsule" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

bear in mind that some occupations are now entirely traditional clankie preserves — forget trying to get a
job cleaning floors unless you’re called Mrs Mopp and people keep asking you about nominative
determinism whenever they first meet you. Oh, and forget qualifying as an auto mechanic, astronaut, or
accountant. (In general, the A’s are right out unless your circulatory system contains more oil than
blood.)

— Alternatively, as long as you remember to take out catastrophic collapse-of-civilization insurance on
your blind five hundred year hedge-fund, you should be sitting pretty when your investments mature and
they thaw you out and grow you a new body. (Otherwise you might not have a leg to stand on.)

— Things you may be taken aback by in the twenty-eight century? (Yes, Miss Feng, I think I’ll have
another top-up ... ah, where was I?) Relations of an intimate nature are somewhat confusing to visitors at
first, because polite society generally recognizes three gender axes, not the four you’re used to. We have
butch/femme, squishie/clankie, and U/non-U. I’m not sure quite why we dropped the old
heterodox/orthodox gender split but I gather it had something to do with the craze for nasal penile
enhancements a couple of centuries ago — or maybe it was to do with the common cold being
reclassified as a sexually transmitted disease? I’m not sure; like matters to do with sex in all ages, it’s
deliberately kept unnecessarily confusing by the self-appointed arbiters of polite society. Anyway, moving
swiftly onwards, as long as you remember that it is a mortal insult to sneeze in public in the presence of a
butch clankie non-U, you’ll be fine.



— Things you will find familiar: we speak English. In fact, our most U aristocracy aspires to the cultural
heights achieved by the late pre-Downsizing anglosphere in its richest and most progressive centres of art
and philosophy in the mid-twenty first century, Manitoba and Wagga-Wagga. The more U squishie
aristocrats have, in fact, preserved the traditional Anglo-American upper crust mores in brine, although
the clankie core are mostly descended from Eastern European black-hat hackers, so you’ll find yourself
perfectly at home here as long as you use P. G. Wodehouse and Stanislaw Lem as your guidebooks.

— As for why you might want to visit our charming century ...

— Dash it all, Miss Feng, what now?

— Oh, only thirty seconds left? They’re not very long, are they?

— Oh, I don’t know why I bother. If the Batley Tourist Board hadn’t leaned on Aunt Agatha the
Aggressive to threaten to box my ears if I didn’t do something for the Drowned Yorkshire Reclamation
Fund ...

— All right then! I will, I will!

— Come to live in the jolly sunny twenty-eighth century. We may be a bit over-insolated, and the Space
Patrol may have a bit of a bloody nuisance on their hands with the alien space leeches from Arcturus, but
at least we’ve got a Space Patrol, unlike some centuries I could mention, and the leeches don’t invade
too often. Immigration is easy — just shoot yourself in the old ticker while sitting on the edge of a bath
full of liquid nitrogen, being sure to fall in carefully — and we natives are friendly, as long as you bring a
bottle of Tawney Port and a cigar from drowned Havana. You can easily get a job below stairs if you
want to rough it, but it’s a great life if you’re re-born rich, and between you and me all you need to do is
remember your collapse-of-civilization insurance and invest ten dollars in