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

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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 Bjцrk 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."
Bjцrk 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."


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Huw zones out during the endless sub-committee meetings that last into early evening, then suffers himself to be dragged to the hotel refectory by Doc Bjцrk and a dusky Romanian Lothario from the Cordon Bleu Catering Committee who casts pointed and ugly looks at him until he slouches away from his baklava and dispiritedly climbs the unfinished concrete utility stairway to sub-level 1, where his toil is to begin. He spends the next four hours trudging around the endless sub-levels of the hotel-bare concrete corridors optimized for robotic, not human, access-hunting buggy transceivers. By the time he gets to his room he's exhausted, footsore, and even more sweaty.
Huw's room is surprisingly posh, but he can't appreciate it. He looks at the oversized sleep-surface and sees the maintenance regimen for its control and feedback mechanism. He spins slowly in the spa-sized loo and all he can think about is the poxy little bots that patrol the plumbing and polish the tile. The media center is a dismal reminder of his responsibility to patrol the endless miles of empty corridor, rebooting little silver mushrooms and watching their blinkenlights for telltale reds.
He fills the pool-sized tub with steaming, lavender- and eucalyptus-scented water, then climbs in, burka and all. The djinn's lamp perches on the tub's edge getting soaked in oversloshes as he shifts his weight, watching the folds of cloth flutter in aquatic slomo as its osmotic layers convect gentle streams of water over his many nooks and (especially) crannies.
"Esteemed sir," the djinn says, its voice echoing off the painted tile.
"Figured that one out, huh?" Huw says. "No more Madame?"
"My infinite pardons," it says. "I have received your jury assignment. You are to report to Fifth People's Technology Court at 0800 tomorrow. You will be supplied with a delicious breakfast of fruits and semolina, and a cold lunch of local delicacies. You should be well-rested and prepared for a deliberation of at least four days."
"Sure thing," Huw says, dunking his head and letting the water rush into his ears. He resurfaces and shakes his head, spattering the walls with water that's slightly gray with bodily ick. "How far's the courthouse?"
"A mere two kilometers. The walk through the colorful and ancient Tripoli streets is both bracing and elevating. You will arrive in a most pleasant and serene state of mind."
Huw kicks at the drain control and the tub gurgles itself empty, reminding him of the great water-reclamation facilities in the sub-basement and their various osmotic tissues and dams. He stands and the burka steams for a moment as every drop of moisture is instantly wrung loose from its weave. "Pleasant and serene. Yeah, right." He climbs tiredly out of the tub and slouches towards the bedroom. "What time is it?"
"It is two-fifteen, esteemed sir," says the djinn. "Would sir care for a sleeping draught?"
"Sir would care for a real hotel," Huw grunts, then lies down on the enormous white rectangle that occupies the center of the bedroom. He doesn't hear the djinn's reply. He's asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.


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A noise like cats fucking in a trash can drags Huw awake most promptly at zero-dark o'clock. "What's that?" he yells.
The djinn doesn't answer: it's prostrate on the bedside table as if hiding from an invisible overhead axe blade. The noise gets louder, if anything, then modulates into chickens drowning in their own blood, with a side-order of Van Halen guitar riffs. "Make it stop!" shouts Huw, stuffing his fingers in his ears.
The noise dies to a distant wail. A minute later it stops and the djinn flickers upright. "My apologies, esteemed sir," it says dejectedly. "I did not with the room sound system mixer volume control interface correctly. That was the most blessed Imam Anwar Mohammed calling the faithful to prayer, or it would have been if not for the feedback."
Huw rolls over and grabs the teapot. "Djinn."
"Yes, oh esteemed sirrah?"
Huw pauses. "You keep calling me that," he says slowly. "Do you realize just how rude that is?"
"Eep! Rude? You appear to be squeezing-"
"Listen." Huw is breathing heavily. He sits up and looks out of the window at the sleeping city. Somewhere, a hundred gigameters beyond the horizon, the sun might be thinking about the faint possibility of rising. "I am a patient man. But. If you keep provoking me like this-"
"-Like what?"
"This hostel. The fucking alarm clock. Talking down to me. Repeatedly insulting my intelligence -