"Stross, Charles & Doctorow, Cory - 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 cafetiиre 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 dйjа vu nagging at the edges of his mind, as if-
"You don't remember me, do you?" asks his companion.
"Alcohol has this effect on me at times," Huw confesses in a grateful rush. "I've got an awful memory-"
"The name's Bonnie," says the man. "You spent most of the early hours trying to cop a feel by convincing me that Nietzsche was responsible for global cooling." Huw stares at him and feels something in his head do an uneasy flip-flop: yes, the resemblance is clear, this is the woman he was talking to last night. " 's amazing what a good bathroom can do in the way of cellular redifferentiation surgery these days, you know?" the bald guy-Bonnie?-continues. Then he winks at Huw with what Huw realizes, to his horror, is either lascivious intent or broad and filthy-minded humor. "How's your hangover? Are you up to picking things up where we left off?"
"Aaaugh," says Huw, as the full force of the post-party cultural hangover hits him between the eyes, right beneath the biohazard trefoil, and the coffee hits his stomach. "Need fresh air now …"


· · · · ·


The next morning, Huw wakes up more gently. Awakened by sunlight, but this time in his own bed. He yawns and sits up, pauses for a moment to get his bearings, then ventures down the comfortably unchanging stairs to retrieve his post. The dusty tiles in his vintage late-nineteenth-century terrace house are cold beneath his bare feet. A draft leaks around the ill-fitting outer door, raising gooseflesh on his bare legs. Two-thirds of the mail is spam, which goes straight on the recycle-before-reading pile, but there's also a genuine letter, complete with a stamp on the envelope. Ink on paper-someone took the trouble to communicate with him personally, putting dumb, thrax-prone matter in motion to make a point.
He rips the envelope open with a cracked fingernail. He reads: your application for international triage jury service has been provisionally accepted. To activate your application, present this letter in person to …
He carries the letter through into the kitchen, puts it on the table so he can keep an eye on it as he eats. He barely notices the morning chill as the battered Red Crescent surplus food processor barfs up a lukewarm cup of Turkish coffee, a vague facsimile of scrambled eggs, and an even vaguer pastiche of bacon. Today is Huw's big day. He's been hoping for this day for months.
Soon, he'll get to say what he thinks about some item of new technology-and they'll have to listen to him.


· · · · ·


Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth's RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems.
A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden Cox Pippin. There's always someone whom evolution has failed to breed the let's-lick-the-frozen-fencepost instinct out of. There's always a fucking geek who'll do it because it's a historical goddamned technical fucking imperative.
Whether the enlightened, occulting smartcloud sends out its missives as pranks, poison or care-packages is up for debate. Asking it to explain its motives is roughly as pointful as negotiating with an ant colony to get it to abandon your kitchen. Whatever the motive, humanity would be much better off if the Cloud would evolve into something so smart as to be uninterested in communicating with meatpeople.
But until that happy day, there's the tech jury service: defending the earth from the scum of the post-singularity patent office.