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Corporation 12
The ascent felt magical. It was as if some kind of force was taking her to the very heavens, dissolving in their unearthly radiance, dissolving so much that she ceased to feel like herself, to share her own thoughts with the breath of the universe surrounding her. Even these thoughts gradually faded away, disappearing into the distant distance, leaving behind only a pitiful echo of the former essence, a quiet echo of the personality that once inhabited it, which for simplicity it called itself.But no, only here, at the very top, a belated understanding came to her of how illusory and vain human auto-perception is. No matter how much you peer into the mirror of being, you will see there not yourself, but only your own reflection, dim, distorted, far from the truth. The long monologue in your head is also not you, but only a meaningless echo of external signals migrating through Broca's zone, only through an oversight, taken by you for your own thoughts, insistently sounding between yo
Corporation 13
- The signal came in, we had to force, sorry.It is clear now why she was so pulled. Drummer quickly ran her eyes over the trace. Sparsely, but some marks of intermediate hops have been preserved, and yes, with every hour the trail will become paler. It is understandable why they are all so nervous. Neither the introduction is normally organized, nor the departure.Was the message attached?- No way, standard single-fire, like everything is in rapidamente.No details, that is. Okay, they didn't work with that. And now it’s clear why such a crowd of “fizi”. Together with the "tailor" they will cover Drummer's ass in case of fire contact. And he will surely introduce himself now, oh, how he will introduce himself.Speaking of butt.- How much time do I have?- Window? Seven minutes for sure before they spot it.Drummer whistled.- Not much.- Should be enough.And looked so frowning.Ha, that should be enough. Feel free to talk to him."Sniffers" as a reasonable compensation for their o
Corporation 14
Like every tiny agricultural town, Abanton was wide awake by six in the morning. Robocouriers scurried along the front gardens, delivering fresh pastries to the yards or rattling milk glass containers, the housewives drove the bird to the dance with loud voices, the children ran from the dog with a squeal, she answered them with joyful barking, somewhere mumbled, calling the unit, a milked cow, the usual reigned for a summer morning, a farce, under which it is so pleasant to get out of bed.Bernard managed to look at the forecast before leaving, so he first opened the side shutters of the greenhouse, and then hurried to the station. It's only about ten minutes to go here, but I had to hurry every time. Yes, it’s understandable, it’s stupid to go out in advance, but if you hesitate, then grab the unicycle and go until they start without you.For once, this time there was still plenty of time, so Bernard walked on foot. So it’s nice for health, and with which of the neighbors along the
Corporation 15
Only here the work became art, and art acquired its real embodiment."Bernard Knecht, you are being asked to return to level five hundred."Yes, what is it!Bernard hated being interrupted while he was working, and so categorically, with things to go, now it’s probably half a day down the drain, and what a day, the sun is so hot, none of your dank gloom that has been sown all summer long in this year the limits of the metropolis.Okay."I'm going down."In the ears, habitually crunched from the pressure drop. Before letting anyone upstairs, bioengineers usually implanted a micropump into the Eustachian tube of high-altitude climbers like Bernard to avoid trouble with the reverse block, but even with it there was enough discomfort. Minus a kilometer in a minute and a half, this is the speed at which a passenger suborbital usually decreases in dense layers. Not only does it sing in the ears, but also the stomach rolls up to the throat at the sight of a splayed forest of stocks rushing t
Corporation 16
Supply disruption was Roger Moore's main headache from the very beginning of the contract, and every single day he began with endless reconciliation checks.In the bowels of some "Eriksson" or "Ar-Rajha" in terms of such issues, he would have sat a whole department of "yellow tokens", arguing to move big data, while an adviser of his level would not even be interested in what and how they reduce there, I looked through the next report out of the corner of my eye, if they screwed up, heads will roll, and the whole tale.But this position was unlike any other. Where thousands of clerks would work on any petty issue in every normal corporation, hundreds of overseers and overseers over overseers, here Roger Moore had only himself and petaflops of calculated capacities, executive and soulless, at the disposal of Roger Moore. They were not mistaken, but they did not show any initiative, they always had to make any decisions themselves.And now, when the monitoring system threw out a banner
Corporation 17
At the same time, the adviser knew for certain that if this all followed a plan, then this plan was constantly being revised.How many times have the same units, sometimes just assembled, been disassembled again, updated or moved from place to place, again and again suggesting the total madness of that unknown architect who was behind this whole project.But Roger Moore, having got used to it, didn’t complain anymore, and now, having briefly glanced over the dashboard, he easily managed to make sure that the completely new - less than a month old - power units of active radiators - have safely passed into the disassembly stage, because after recalculating the introductory the temperature regime has changed, and now metallic sodium has been appointed as the coolant with all the ensuing requirements for the specific output power.And so every day, as long as the adviser remembered the history of the crazy project.The scale was also striking - gigawatts of power, hundreds of thousands o
Corporation 18
The radius of Guangzhou-Zhanjiang, for my taste, was the most inhospitable place on this planet. Two hundred million people, a complex patchwork of zones controlled by Yanguang and Tri-Trade, a wild amount of industrial abandonment from the time of the Great Experiment, the terrible ecology associated with this, and yes, orderly rows of towers of the first wave of development, twined to the waist with a communication network.The Slinkers called these two hundred kilometers along the coast "glade", so freely any representative of our respected profession felt here. Corporate freemen on the ruins of the former autonomous regions, the rampant level of corruption and banal slovenliness on the ground, the overall density of buildings plus the abundance of "gray", no-man's objects turned the "glade" into the Asian branch of Central Africa during the post-war Black Boom.For a slinker, there was always work here, and it wasn’t about money at all - perhaps only the magical Bohai or the Islan
Corporation 19
And no one around, not a single extra signal. Even the lidar of the Corporation's agents, which glided over the client's car, I still spotted. There was nothing at all here. Even the blackness of the signal blockade, like there, in the client's apartment.An ordinary residential tower, also half empty, but still filled with the usual household signals. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't see anyone else.It was impossible to pull the rubber further.Either move forward or leave. But you can stand like this, listening, endlessly.And then I made up my mind.Unauthorized movement across foreign territory, even for an experienced slinker, is not an easy task. Other representatives of our kind of activity study this all their lives, mastering the difficult science of penetrating secure communications, hacking systems from the outside and from the inside. Others seem to be born with this knowledge, possessing, if you like, a special angle of view, when instead of breaking through a