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

As the judge rants on about punctuality and the behavior of the dutiful and obedient juror (which, Huw is led to believe, had always been deplorable but has been in terminal decline ever since the abolition of capital punishment for contempt of court back in the eighteenth century) he takes stock of his fellow jurors. For the first time he has reason to be glad of his biohazard burka-and its ability to completely obscure his snarl of anger-because he knows at least half of them. The bastard pseudo-random number generators at the People's Magical Libyan Jamahiriya embassy must be on the blink, because besides Doc Bjцrk-whom he kind-of expected-the jury service has summoned none other than Sandra Lal, and an ominously familiar guy with a blue forelock, and the irritating perpetually-drunk centenarian boomer from next door but one. There are a couple of native Libyans, but it looks as if the perennially booming Tripolitanian economy has turned jury service evasion into a national sport. Hence the need to import guest-jurors.
Fuck me, all I need is that turd Adrian to make it a clean sweep, thinks Huw. This must be some kind of set-up. He settles on a bench in a rustle of static-charged fabric and waits for proceedings to begin.
The Vulture stands up and hunches over the lectern. "Listen up!" She rasps, in a forty-a-day voice that sounds like she's about due for another pair of lungs. "I am doctor Rosa Giulliani-that's a doctor of law-and I have volunteered my services for the next two weeks to chair this court, or focus group, or three-ring circus. You are the jury, or potential consumers, or performing animals. Procedurally the PMLJ have given me total autonomy as long as I conduct this hearing in strict accordance within the bounds of international law as laid down by the Hague Tribunal on Trans-Human Manifestations and Magic. Some of you may not fully comprehend what this means. What it means is that you are here to decide whether a reasonable person would consider it safe to unleash Exhibit A on the world. If Exhibit A turns out to be a weapon of planetary destruction, we will probably all die. If Exhibit A turns out to be a widget that brings everlasting happiness to the whole of humanity, we will probably all get to benefit from the consequences. So I will enforce extreme measures against any rat-bastard who tries to smuggle a sample out of this room. I will also nail to the wall the hide of anyone who talks about Exhibit A outside this room, because there are hardware superweapons and there are software superweapons, and we don't know what Exhibit A is, yet. For all we know it's a piece of hardware that looks like a portable shower cubicle then turns round and installs antique Microsoft crashware in your thalamus. So."
Giulliani subsides in a fit of racking coughs. The person next to Huw, a young punk of indeterminate-or no-gender, turns and winks at him, then mutters something incomprehensible in Czech. "Cool, I wonder what she'll pay for a new set of Kurdish lungs, one careful owner?" Huw's tea-pot translates.
Huw stares back for a moment, then shrugs.
Judge Giulliani gathers herself, and Huw fiddles idly with the dialect gain on the djinn's translation engine control panel:
"We follow a set procedure. Y'all liss'n here. A statement is delivard by the dayum fool script kiddies who downloaded the memeplex from the metasphere an' who're applyin fer custodial riats ta it. This describes the prior backgroun' ta their actions. Ya reckon? Secondly, a preliminary activation of the device may be conducted in a closed environment. Thirdly, o buss dis. You rabble git to talk 'boutit. Foethly, you split into two teams: advocates an' prosecution. Yo taxe be to convince members uh de othuh team to join you. Sheeit! Finally, you deliver your majority verdict to me and I check it for procedural compliance. Then with any luck I get to hang the meddling kids. Ere-a zeere-a uny qooesshuns?"
Huw shakes his head, bemused. For some reason he can't get the teapot to give Judge Giulliani an authentic Neapolitan accent. But Doc Bjцrk is already waving a hand in the air, eager to please. The judge turns a black gaze on her, one that reminds Huw of historical documentaries about the Ayatollah Khomeini, but Bjцrk refuses to wilt.
"What," rasps Giulliani, "is it?"
"About this Exhibit, yah? Is it the box, in? And if so, how secure the containment is? I would hate for your worries to depart the abstract and concretize themselves, as it were."
"Huh." The judge stalks out from behind her lectern and kicks the box, hard. She must be wearing steel toe-caps, from the noise it makes. Huw whimpers faintly, envisaging imminent post-singularity grey goop catalyzed nano-annihilation, beyond any hope of resurrection. But the only terrible consequence is that the judge smiles, horribly. "It are being safe," she announces. "Box are being waste containment vessel left over from second French fast breeder program." This announcement brings an appreciative nod from a couple of members of the audience. The second French fast breeder program was nothing to do with nuclear reactors and everything to do with disaster-mitigation replicators bred to mop up the eight giga-Curies of plutonium the first program scattered all over Normandy. Even Huw is forced to admit that the alien memeplex is probably safe behind the Maginot line of nanotech containment widgets lining the diamond-reinforced tungsten carbide safe.
"So when do we get to see it?" asks Huw, tweaking his teapot back onto its original dialect setting.
Judge Giulliani turns her vicious gaze on him. "Right now!" She snarls, and thumps her fist on the lectern. The lights dim, and a multimedia presentation wobbles and firms up on top of her lectern. "Listen up! Let the following testimony entered under oath on placeholder-goes-here be entered in the court record under this-case-number. Go ahead, play, damn you."
The scene is much as Huw would have imagined it: a couple of pudgy nocturnal hackers holed up in a messy bedroom floored in discarded ready meal packs, air hazy with programmable utility foglets, are building a homebrew long baseline radio telescope array by reprogramming their smart wallpaper. They work quietly, exchanging occasional cryptic suggestions about how to improve their rig's resolving power and gain. About the only thing that surprises Huw is that they're both three years old-foreheads swollen before their time with premature brain bridges. A discarded pile of wooden alphabet blocks lies in one corner of the room. A forlorn teddy bear lies on the top bunk with its back to the camera viewpoint.
"Ooh, aren't they cute?" squeaks Sandra. "The one on the left is just like my younger brother was, before his little accident!"
"Silence in court, damn your eyes! What do you think this is, an adoption hearing? Behold, Abdul and Karim Bey. Their father is a waiter and their mother is a member of the presidential guard." (Brief clips of a waiter and a woman in green battle-dress with an improbably complicated gun drift to either side of the nursery scene.) "Their parents love them, which is why they paid for the very best prenatal brainbox upgrades. With predictable results."
Abdul and Karim are pounding away at their tower of rather goopy-looking foglets-like all artifacts exposed to small children, it has begun to turn gray and crinkly at the corners-but now they are receiving a signal, loud and clear. They're short on juice, but Karim has the bright idea of eviscerating Teddy and plugging his methanol-powered fuel cell into the tots' telescope. It briefly extrudes a maser, blats a signal up through the thin roof of their commodity housing, and collapses in exhaustion.
The hackers have only five minutes or so to wait-in which time Abdul speed-reads an illicit download of The Satanic Verses while Karim rolls on his back making googling noises as he tries to grab his feet-for they have apparently found the weakly godlike AIs of the metasphere in a receptive mood. As the bitstream comes in, Abdul whacks his twin brother upside the head with a purple velour giraffe. Karim responds by irritably uploading a correctly formatted patent application with the godvomit as an attachment.
"I hate smart-alec kids," mumbles the bald guy with the blue forelock, sitting across the room. The judge pretends to ignore him.
"These two miscreants are below the contractual age of consent," Huw hears himself muttering, "so how come their application is being accepted?"
"Here in the PMLJ, as you should well know seeing you're staying here," the judge croaks, "your civil rights are a function of your ability to demand them. Which is a bit annoying, because Karim demanded the vote six months ago, while Abdul is a second lieutenant in the People's Memetic Self-Defense Forces and a dab-hand at creating new meme viruses. In fact, there's some question over whether we shouldn't actually be dragging him up in front of a military tribunal instead."
Judge Giulliani seems to have forgotten to snarl; her commentary is becoming almost civilized as the presentation from the subpoenaed crib-cam fast-forwards to the terrible two's attempt to instantiate the bitstream in atoms. Using a ripped Teddy bear as a containment vessel.
"Ah, here, you see it here. The artifact is extremely flexible, but not so flexible that it can gestate in a pseudo-living toy. Abdul's own notes speculate that gestation may be supported in medium-sized dogs, goats, and camels." Over the lectern, the display zooms in on the teddy-bear's swollen gut. The bear is jerking spasmodically and ticcing like a Tourettic children's TV host, giggling and stuttering nonsensical self-worth affirmations. The gut distends further and the affirmations become more disjointed, and then a long, sharp blade pokes its way through the pseudoflesh and flame-retardant fur-analogue. "There are indications that the artifact floods its host organism with endorphins at metamorphosis-time," the judge says, and the rent in the bear's belly widens, and out climbs a shimmering thing.
It takes Huw a moment to understand what he's seeing. The artifact is a tall, metallic stalk, at first coiled like a cobra, but gradually roused to full erectness. Its glistening tip dips down towards the bear. "See how it sutures the exit wound?" the judge says, a breath of admiration in her rough voice. "So tidy. Jurors, take note, this is a considerate artifact." Indeed, the bear's fur has been closed with such cunning that it's almost impossible to see the exit wound. However, something has gone horribly awry inside of it, as it is now shaking harder than ever, shivering off its limbs and then its fur, and soon its flesh starts breaking away like the sections of a tangerine.
The artifact stands erect again, bounces experimentally a couple times, then collapses in a way that Huw can't make any sense of. He's not alone, either. The jurors let out a collective uncomprehending bleat. "Look closely, jurors!" the judge says, and the scene loops back on itself a couple times in slomo, from multiple angles, then again in wireframe. It makes Huw's mind hurt. The artifact's stalk bulges in some places, contracts in others, all the whole slipping through and around itself. His potmaker's eye tries to no avail to understand what's happening to the topology and volume.
"Fucking lovely," a voice nearby gasps. He recognizes it as Sandra Lal's. She's always had a thing about trompe l'oeil solid. "Nicest Klein bottle I've ever seen."
Klein bottle. Of course. Take a Moebius strip and extrude it one more dimension out and you get a vessel with only two dimensions, the inside and outside a single continuous plane. Glassblower shit. Fucking showoffs.
The young brothers are on hands and knees before the artifact now, staring in slack-jawed concentration, drool slipping between their patchworks of baby teeth and down their chins. The cam zooms in on the artifact, and it begins to fluoresce and pulse, as through it were digesting a radioactive hamster. The peristaltic throbbing gives it motion, and it begins to work its way toward the hamper in the corner of the room. It inches its way across the floor, trailed by the crawling brothers, and knocks over the hamper, and begins to burrow through the spilled, reeking linens.
"It's scat-tropic," Doc Bjцrk says.
"Yes," the Judge says. "And scat-powered. Karim notes that its waste products are a kind of silt, similar to diatomaceous earth, and equally effective as a roach and beetle powder, as well as water and trace elements."
"A fractional-dimensional parasitic turd-gobbler from outer space?" Huw says. "Have I got that right?"
"That's right, ma'am," says the blue-forelocked joe. "And it's pretty, too. I'd gestate one, if only to eliminate the need for a bloody toilet. Quite a boon to your average WHO-standard pit-latrine, too, I imagine." The voice, he recognizes the voice. It belongs to Bonnie: the transhumanist she-he that Lal introduced to him at the party where he became patient zero for whatever GM crapola he is carrying. He wonders if she-he is fucking Lal: Sandra's neuter, although it's not as if that's stopped anyone in a decade.
"Of course you'd gestate one," Huw says. "Nothing to you if your body is dissolved into toxic tapioca. I imagine you're just about ready to join the Cloud anyroad."
Sandra casts him a poisonous glare. "Fuck you, and the goat you rode into town on," she hisses. "Who the hell are you, anyway?"
"Judge?" Doc Bjцrk says, desperately trying to avoid a mass execution for contempt of court, "My co-juror raises an interesting point. What evidence do we have to support Adbul's assertion that the artifact can safely gestate in mammals, or more specifically primates?"
The Judge grunts irritably. "Only simulations, of course," she says. "Were you volunteering?" Doc Bjцrk sits back hastily.
"Are you seated comfortably?" Giulliani asks pointedly. "Then I shall continue." She whacks her gavel on the lectern and the presentation rolls boringly on. "Here, near as we can tell, is the artifact's life-cycle." In fast-forward, the space monster digests the twins' nappy hamper then chows down on their bedding while Abdul-or maybe it's Karim-hastily jury-rigs an EMP gun out of animatronic toys and an air force surplus radar set. The twins back into a corner and wait, wide-eyed, as the thing sprouts a pink exoskeleton lined with throbbing veins, rabbit ears, and a set of six baby elephant legs with blue toenails. It squats in the middle of their room, hooting and pinging as it digests the pile of alphabet blocks. Karim-or maybe it's Abdul-improvises a blue goo attack using the roomful of utility fog, but the ad hoc nanoweaponry just slimes off the space monster like so much detergent.
"At this point, the manifestation estivated," announces the Judge.
"Duh, wassatmean?" asks one of the other jurors, one who Huw doesn't know-possibly a nationalist from the Neander valley.
"It went to sleep," explains Doc Bjцrk. "Isn't that right, Judge?"
"Damn straight." The Judge whacks her gavel again. "But if I get any more lip out of you, sunshine, I'll have you flogged. This is my trial. Clear?"
Bjцrk opens her mouth, closes it, then nods.
"Well," says Judge Giulliani, with some satisfaction, "that's that, then. The thing seems to have fallen deeply asleep. Just in case it wakes up, the PMLJ Neighborhood Sanitation Committee have packed it into a Class Four nanohazard containment vessel-which I'm standing on right now-and shipped it over here. We're going to try a directed revival after lunch, with full precautions. Then I'll have a think about it, you damned meddling baboons can enter my verdict, and we'll wrap up in time for tea. Court will adjourn! Make sure you're all back here in three hours time-or else."
In case the message isn't sufficiently clear, the bench Huw is perched on humps up into an uncomfortable ridge, forcing him to stand. The Vulture storms out the back of the courtroom in a flurry of black robes, leaving a pool of affronted jurors milling around a lectern containing a sleeping puddle of reified godvomit.
"All right, everyone," announces Doc Bjцrk, clapping her hands together. "How about we go and find the refectory in this place? I could murder a baklava!"
Huw slouches off towards the entrance in a black humor, teapot clanking at his hip. This isn't going quite the way he'd imagined, and he'll be damned before he'll share a refectory table with that sanctimonious Swedish girl scout, much less Sandra and her genderbending (and disturbingly attractive) friend. Someone is quite clearly doing this in order to get under his skin, and he is deeply pissed off. On the other hand, it's a long time since breakfast-and there must be somewhere that serves a decent tofuburger in Tripoli.
Mustn't there?


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