"Williams,.Walter.Jon.-.Hardwired" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

"We think he was originally from Russia," Cunningham goes on, "but the Korolev Bureau has always been secretive and we don't have a complete list of their senior staff and designers. When he rated the new body, he asked to be a woman. He's important enough so that they gave it to him, but they gave him a demotion-they rotate out all their old people to make way for the new. She's doing courier duty now. "
Not unusual, Sarah thinks. These days you can get pornography read straight into the brain, plenty of chances to sample whatever pleasures you like and then, if rich enough, get yourself a new body to suit your tastes. But the technology of personality transfer is imperfect-sometimes bits get left behind: memories, abilities, traits that might be useful. A succession of bodies can mean successive senility. If you get a new body and aren't so powerful you can't be moved, you are often demoted until you can prove yourself.
"What's her new name?" she asks.
"She'll tell you, I'm sure. Let's just call her Princess for now."
Sarah shrugs. There are half a dozen imbecilic security rules in this operation, and she guesses that most of them are simply to test her capacity for obedience.
"Her new body doesn't seem to have altered his sexual orientation, just his manner of expressing it," Cunningham says. "Princess has exhibited some characteristic behaviors since she's started her new job. When she's on the ground, she likes to go slumming. Find herself a working girl-sometimes a dirtgirl, most often a jock-and take her home for a night or two. She wants a pet, but a dangerous one. Not too clean. A little rough. Not too removed from the street. But civilized enough to know how to please. Not a thatch. "
"That's me?" Sarah asks, with no surprise. "Her new pet?"
"We've researched you. You were a licensed prostitute for five years. And rated highly by your employers. "
"Five and a half," she says. "And not with girls."
"He's a man, really. An old man. Why should it be hard for you?"
Sarah looks at the blond freckled girl in the holo, trying to find the old Russian in those eyes. The look that was always the same, wanting her to be some piece of private fantasy, real but not too real, orgasms genuine but never with genuine passion. The plastic girl, an object for things that grew hidden in their minds, something they could get rid of quickly and never have to take home. They were upset, somehow, if you didn't understand their fantasy right away. After a while she had got so that she could.
No different from all the other old men, she thinks as she looks at the picture. Not really. They want power, over their own flesh and another's. Pay not so much for sex, but for power over sex, over the thing that threatens to control them. And so they take their passion and use it to control others. She understands control all right.
She looks up at Cunningham. "Did they give you a new body as well?" she asks. "Guaranteed inconspicuous? Or did you have Firebud make you over, so that you had no style at all?"
He gazes at her steadily, the same calm gaze. She can't seem to touch it, or him. "I can't say," he says.
"How long have you worked for them?" she asks. "You were a mudboy once-you don't have the look that they do. But you work for them now. Is that what they promised you? A new body when you get old? And if you die on one of these jobs here in the mud, a nice funeral with the corporate anthem sung over your body?"
"Something like that," he agrees.
"Got you heart and soul, have they?" she asks.
"That's how they want it." Dryly, accepting. He knows the price of his ticket.
"Control," she says. "You understand that. You are owned by people who worship control, and so you control yourself, well. But you're a pressure cooker, and the steam is just under the surface. Do you go slumming in your off hours, like Princess? To the clubs, to the houses? Are you one of my old customers?" She gazes into his expressionless eyes. "You could be," she says. "I never remembered faces."
"As it happens, I'm not," he says. "I never saw you before I was given this assignment." He is beginning to look a little out of patience.
Sarah grins. "Don't worry," she says, and throws the holo of Princess on the table. "I'll do your owners proud."
"I'm sure you will," he says. "They won't have it any other way."

IN THE ZONE/YES

Like Times Square neon, the amber LED tracks across the upper limits of Sarah's vision, just where the shadow of her brows would be.

PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...

The Aujourd'Oui is Princess's favorite spot, but there are others. Sarah should be ready to move at need.
The washroom at the Aujourd'Oui is a conglomeration of mirrors and soft white lights, red flock on the gold wallpaper, bronze waterspouts above the sinks, chromed dispensers that offer tissue for the adjustment of makeup. Sarah shoulders through the door, and a pair of dirtgirls standing in front of the mirrors glance at her. There is envy in their glance, and a kind of desperate awe, and then the eyes turn self-consciously back to the mirrors. The satin jacket represents something they want and will most likely never have, the freedom of the white crane to climb into the sky amid the silver glitter of stars. Sarah is suddenly aware of the sound of sobbing, magnified by the low ceiling, the hard edges of the room. The dirtgirl's eyes stay fixed in their own reflections as she passes and steps into a stall.
It is the girl in the next stall who is weeping, pausing only to draw massive shuddering breaths before bringing the air out again through the tortured muscles of the throat. It hurts to cry that hard, Sarah knows. The ribs feel as if they are breaking. The stall shudders to the impact as the girl drives her head against its wall, and Sarah knows that it is pain the girl is seeking, perhaps to drive out pain of another kind.
Sarah tries not to get between people and what they need.
To the sound of the impacts Sarah takes her inhaler from her belt, puts it to her nose, and triggers it. There is a brief hiss of compressed gas. Sarah throws her head back, feeling the rush of hardfire racing along her nerve paths. The stall quakes. Sarah inhales again, using the other nostril, and she feels her body go warm and then cold, the hair on her forearms prickling. Her lips peel back from her teeth, and she feels at once abnormally sensitive and abnormally hard, as if her skin is made of razor blades that can feel every mote of dust. She needs the bite of the drug, needs it to give herself that extra piece of conviction. She hadn't mentioned it to Cunningham. The hell with him-she'll play it her own way...

PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...

The other girl's weeping is a whining, grating sound, like a saw on bone, syncopated with the hysterical crashing as she smashes again and again into the divider. Sarah can see flecks of blood daubing the floor of the next stall. She opens her door and sweeps through the room, past the dirtgirls, whose eyes stand out pale amid their rimming of kohl as they gaze at each other and wonder what to do about the sobbing casualty. PRINCESS AUJOURD'OUI REPEAT AUJOURD'OUI AM SWITCHING POLICE TRANSMISSIONS GOOD HUNTING CUNNINGHAM.
Sarah blinks as she steps into the darkness of the club, feeling the hardfire impelling her limbs to motion, and she rides the drug like a jock on the flaming roman candle of a booster, climbing for the edge of the sky and still in control. The corners of the room, the dancers and fixtures, flare like liquid-crystal kaleidoscopes.
And then Princess comes, and Sarah's motion freezes. Princess is surrounded by dirtboy muscle, but she stands out clearly in the dark-there is an aura about her, a glow. She has the Look as none of them have, a soft radiance that speaks of luxury, soft and carefree joys, freedom even from gravity. A life even the jocks can't share. It seems as if there is a pause in the music, as the room inhales in mutual awe. Two hundred eyes can see the glow and a hundred mouths, hungry for it, begin to salivate. Sarah feels her body tingle, flares of nerve warmth at her fingertips. She is ready.
Sarah gives a soft private laugh, as if her triumph were already a fact, and walks long-legged across the darkened bar as Firebud has taught her, swinging her broad shoulders in counterpoint to her hips, insinuant animal style. She gives a grin to the muscle and holds her hands palms out to show them she carries no weapons, and then Princess stands before her.
She is a good four inches shorter and Sarah looks down at her, hands cocked on her hips, challenging. Princess's soft blond hair is worn long, ringlets playing with her cheeks, her ears. Her eyes are circled with vast blooms of purple and yellow makeup, to look like bruises, making public the secret wish of a translucent white face that has never known pain. Her mouth is a deep violet, another laceration. Sarah cocks her head back and laughs low, baring her teeth, and thinks of the sounds hyenas make on the hunt.
"Dance with me, Princess," she says to the wide cornflower eyes. "I am your wildest dreams."

PRACTICE CREATES PERFECTION
PERFECTION CREATES POWER
POWER CONQUERS LAW
LAW CREATES HEAVEN
A helpful reminder from Toshiba