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

decibel level.
Doctor Björk fishes in her old-fashioned bum-bag and produces a stylus and a scrap of scribable material, scribbles a moment and passes it
over: DINNER PLANS?
Huw shook his head. Dinner—ugh. He's gamy and crusty with dried sweat under his burka and can't imagine eating, but he supposes he'd
better put some fuel in the boiler before he sleeps.
Björk scrolls her message off the material, then scribbles again: I KNOW A PLACE. LOBBY@18H?
Huw nods, suppressing a wince. Björk smiles at him, looking impossibly healthy and scrubbed underneath her zinc armor.

·····
The Marriott is not a Marriott; it's a Revolutionary Progress Hostel. (There are real hotels elsewhere in Tripoli, but they all charge real hotel bills,
and the government is trying to run the tech jury service on the cheap.) Huw's djinn spiels a little rantlet about King Ghadaffi's critique of
trademarks, and explains that this is the People's Marriott, where the depredations of servile labor have been eliminated in favor of automated
conveniences, the maintenance and disposition of which is managed by a Resident's Committee, and primly admonishes him for being twenty
minutes late to his first Committee meeting, which is to run for another two hours and forty minutes.
"Can't I just go to my room and have a wash?" Huw asks. "I'm filthy."
"Ah! One thousand pardons, Madame! Would that our world was a perfect one and the needs of the flesh could come before the commonweal!
It is, however, a requirement of residence at the People's Marriott. You need to attend and be assigned a maintenance detail, and be trained in
the chores you are to perform. The common room is wonderfully comfortable, though, and your fellow committee members will be delighted to
make you most very welcome indeed!"
"Crap," Huw says.
"Yes," the djinn says, "of course. You'll find a WC to your left after you pass through the main doors."
Huw stalks through both sets of automatic doors, which judder and groan open and creak shut. The lobby is a grandiose atrium with grimy spun
diamond panes fifteen meters above his head through which streams gray light that feeds a riotous garden of root-vegetables and xeroscaped
desert scrub. His vision clouds over, then a double row of shaky blinkenlights appear before him, strobing the way to the common room. Huw
heaves a put-upon sigh and shambles along their path.
The common-room is hostel chic, filled with sagging sofas, a sad and splintery gamesurface, and a collection of a half-dozen morose
international travelers clutching at their teapots and scrawling desultorily on a virtual whiteboard. The collaborative space is cluttered with torn-
off sheets of whiteboard, covering every surface. Doc Björk has beaten him here, and she is already in the center of the group, animatedly
negotiating for the lightest detail possible.
"Huw!" she calls as he plants himself in the most remote sofa, which coughs up a cloud of dust and stale farts smelling of the world's variegated
cuisines.
He lifts one hand weakly and waves. The other committee members are staring at him coldly, with a glint of feral calculation in their eyes, and
Huw has a feeling he's about to get the shittiest job in the place. Mitigate the risk, he thinks.
"Hi there, I'm Huw. I'm here on jury duty, so I'm not going to be available during the days. I'm also a little, uh, toxic at the moment, so I'll need to
stay away from anything health-related. Something in the early evening, not involving food or waste systems would be ideal, really. What fits the
bill?" He waits a moment while the teapots chatter translations from all over the room. Huw hears Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Spanish, French, and
American.
Various whiteboards are reshuffled from around the room, and finally a heroically ugly ancient Frenchman who looks like an albino chimp
squeaks some dependencies across the various boards with a stylus. He coughs out a rapid and hostile stream of French, which the teapot
presently translates. "You'll be on comms patrol. There's a transceiver every three meters. You take spare parts around to each of them, reboot
them, watch the Power-On Self-Test and swap out any dead parts. Even numbered floors tonight, odd floors tomorrow, guest rooms the day
after." He tosses a whiteboard at Huw, and it snaps to centimeters from his nose, a-crawl with floorplans and schematics for broadband relay
transceivers.
"Well, that's done," Huw says. "Thanks."
Björk laughs. "You're not even close to done. That's your tentative assignment—you need to get checked out on every job, in case you're
reassigned due to illness or misadventure."
"You're kidding," he says, rolling his eyes.
"I am not. My assignment is training new committee members. Now, come and sit next to me, the Training and Skills-Assessment sub-
committee is convening here."