"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

counties, each had their own essential services—
food, water, navigation, engines, and medical equip-
ment. God only knows how they divvied up the
workload; maybe they fought for it! But Sears and
Roebuck wandered around with the Fred body until
they found a batch of machines that they claimed
were "MedGrams," tossed the torso inside, and began
poking blue and red buttons on a control panel.
A couple of hours later—I watched, but Arlene
went to sleep on one of the beds—the torso was
flopping around, trying to move its nonexistent arms,
legs, and head.
"Great," I said, "but now what? It has no mouth;
how can it tell us anything?"
"Vocoder," said Sears and Roebuck, speaking for
the first time since finding the body. They clipped a
few more leads onto the chest of the Fred, palmed a
touchplate, and a mechanical voice sounded through
the speakers.
". . . DARES STAND AGAINST THE MIGHTY
. . . WHO DARES THE DEMONS OF UNBE-
HEADED SUNLIGHT WHO FOOLISHLY TEMPTS
THE . . . PEOPLE OF THE DARK AND THE HOT
THE PEOPLE OF THE CRACKS OF—"
Sears and Roebuck turned it off. They fiddled with
the settings and played it again, this time all in a weird
language that made my teeth ache—presumably
Sears and Roebuck's own language.
Arlene had jerked awake at the first noise. She
stared wildly, still trying to cold-boot her brain and
figure out who was just shouting.
"Pretty impressive," I said. "How did it know
English?"
Sears and Roebuck stared at me as if I were a
particularly slow child. "Fly, you and Arlene have
been talk around English for eight week now. What
you did think the compu-nets were doing?"
I got a creepy feeling in my gut, like a couple of
poisonous centipedes had got loose in there. "You
mean that thing has been listening to every word we
say? Jesus."
Arlene looked around nervously. "Has it been ...
watching us, too?"
"Sometimes."
"Even when ... during my private moments, in
the bathhouse?"
"Sometimes," admitted Sears and Roebuck, adding
nonchalantly, "we spent time observing you two, too.
We are curious how you mates if you will demonstrate
use of your mate apparatus."