"Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow - Jury Service" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Jury Service by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow

For a change, Huw's head hurts more than his bladder. He's lying head-down, on his back, in a bathtub. He scrabbles for a handhold and pulls
himself upright. A tub is a terrible place to spend a night—or a morning, come to think of it—he blinks and sees that it's midafternoon. The light
slanting in through a high window limns the strange bathroom's treacly Victorian fixtures with a roseate glow.
That was quite a party. He vaguely remembers the gathering dawn, its red glow staining the wall outside the kitchen window as he discussed
environmental politics with a tall, shaven-headed woman with a blue forelock and a black leather mini-dress straight out of the twentieth century.
(He has an equally vague memory of her defending a hardcore transhumanist line: score nil-nil to both sides.) A brief glance tells him that this
room wasn't a bathroom when he went to sleep in it: bits of the bidet are still crawling into position and there's a strong smell of VOCs in the air.
His head hurts.
Leaning over the sink, Huw twiddles the taps until they begin to dribble cold water. He splashes his face and runs his hand through his thinning
hair, glances up at the mirror, and yells "Shit!"
There's a spindly black biohazard trefoil tattooed on his forehead. It wasn't there yesterday.
Behind him, the door opens. "Having a good morning?" asks Sandra Lal, whose mutable attic this must therefore be. She's holding a three-kilo
minisledge in one hand, tossing it into the air and catching it like a baton-twirler, her grotesquely muscled forearm bulging with hyperpressured
blood and hormones at each catch.
"I wish," he groans. Sandra's parties tend to be wild. "Am I too late for the dead dog?"
"You're never too late." Sandra smiles broadly, camping it up. "Coffee's on in the kitchen, which is on the ground floor today. Bonnie gave me a
subscription to House of the Week and today's my new edition—don't worry if you can't remember where everything is, just remember the
entrance is at ground level, okay?"
"Coffee," Huw says fervently. His head is pounding, but so is his bladder. "Um. Can I have a minute?"
"Yes, but I'd like my spare rest room back afterwards. It's going to be en-suite, but first I've got to knock out the wall through into the bedroom."
She hefts her sledgehammer suggestively.
Huw slumps down on the toilet as Sandra shuts the door behind her and bounces off to roust out any other left-over revelers. He shakes his
head as he relieves himself: trapped in a mutating bathroom by a transgendered atheist Pakistani role-playing critic. Why do I keep ending up in
these situations? he wonders as the toilet gives him a scented wash and blow-dry: when it offers him a pubic trim he hastily retrieves his kilt and
goes in search of coffee.
Sandra's new kitchen is frighteningly modern—it's one of those white room jobs that looks empty at first, sterile as an operating theatre, but
oozes when you glance away, extruding worktops and food processors and fresh-fabbed cutlery. If you sit suddenly there'll be a chair waiting to
catch your buttocks on the way down. No separate appliances, just smart matter and raw ingredient feedstock. Last night it looked charmingly
gas-fired and Victorian, but now Huw can see it in the raw. He feels queasy, wondering if he ate anything from it. But relief is at hand. At the far
end of the room there's a traditional-looking dumb worktop with a battered old-fashioned electric cafetière sitting on it. And some joe who looks
strangely familiar is sitting there reading a newsheet.
Huw nods at him. "Uh, where are the mugs?" he asks.
The guy stares at Huw's forehead for an uncomfortable moment, then gestures at something foggy that's stacked behind the pot. "Pick one of
those," he says.
"Uh, right." Glassy aerogel cups with walls a centimeter thick, light as frozen cigar smoke. He takes the jug and pours, hand shaking. Huw has
got the hot-and-cold sweats. What the hell was I drinking? he wonders as he takes a sip.
He glances at his companion, evidently another survivor of the party: a medium-height bald joe, maybe in his mid-thirties, with the unnaturally
stringy build that comes from overusing a calorie-restriction implant. No piercings, no scars, tattoos, or neomorphisms—apart from his figure—
which might be natural. That plus his black leather body suit means he could be a fellow naturalist. But this is Sandra's house, and she has
distressingly eclectic tastes.
"That today's?" he asks, glancing at the paper.
"It could be." The fellow puts it down and grins oddly. "Had a good lie-in?"
"I woke up in the bathroom," Huw says ruefully. "Milk—"
"Here." He shoves something that resembles a bowl of blue ice-cubes at Huw. Huw pokes at one dubiously, then dunks it in his mug. "Hey, this
stuff is organic, isn't it?"
"Only the best polymer-stabilized emulsions for Sandra," the joe says sardonically. "Of course it's organic—nothing but carbon, hydrogen,
nitrogen, and a tinge of oxygen to them." Huw takes a sip. "Of course, you could say the same about your cellphone," adds the stranger.
"Ah." Huw puts the mug down, unsure where the conversation's leading. There's something disturbing about this: a sense of déjà vu nagging at