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Corporation 26
Stone guest, shake your handYou see, the palms, although torn,They hold a brush, its marbleIt seems hot, but it would be riskyBelieve him if told to me:Do not shake this hand even in the most beautiful dream.(Here and below, the author of the poem: Evgeny Fedorov, Tequilajazzz )The end of the iteration was approaching, and with it the resource of cleaning blocks was coming to an end. With each breath she felt how close he was to exhaustion. Traitor circles swam before his eyes, his fingertips went numb, his right leg tingled, large drops of sweat trickled down his collar.The latter was especially disgusting - the cassette for water recirculators was rotten yesterday, and since then sand has been poured in the mouth. If someone asked Autumn now what is more important to her, a sip of water or a breath of fresh air, she would probably think hard about what to answer.However, her brain by that moment, in its cognitive capabilities, was more like a half-finished scraps - the only
Corporation 27
Quickly fixing everything and quickly running her eyes over the rest of the code, Autumn, exhaling, again sent the pipeline to the queue. An attack of anger at herself even brought her to her senses a little, although the sweat again spilled in a sticky trickle down her collar.And then, why not be angry, she left her comfort zone, one might say, just to get some air, so here you go, after an hour she managed to be up to her ears in shit, and yes, on the back of a man, in general, unknown to her , whom she did not ask to save her at all, and who was, in general, to blame for all her current troubles.So she told him, even in flight, calling him an asshole.Hesperus, however, or whatever he was, was not offended.“And anyway, you were following me, creeping bastard!”And he did not deny this, nodding his sky-red visor for solidity.“If only it was about how bad I am. The people who slipped that message to you know something a little too much about me - that's already a problem. And if
Corporation 28
Before battening down the internal bulkhead, be sure to check the personal meter. And it’s not even about the upcoming problems with oncology, and not about the premature termination of the contract - “Yanguang Zituan”, of course, will not spend money on delivering your carcass to the home port, it’s much easier without any special honors to send you by a passing ore carrier that set off to Mother every fourteen days. No one cares that you die prematurely here, but you are responsible for expensive equipment.Fields inside the hull on the "Shuguan" automatic harvesting detects almost daily. Marks, cleans up, but where is the guarantee that on the way to the airlock you will not get an extra dose? And radiation is an insidious thing, it gives you the first thing in the brain. You haven’t felt anything yet, and there is no cognitive functioning, even under the transcranial stimulus technique, especially under it. So you, even without realizing anything yourself, are already incompetent.
Corporation 29
And then they climb to turn you over. And it looks like nothing special. Unless their shells are from Red, but the Yangguan ones will not be worse."Can you hear it now?"... who are you, I ask you?“We are who we need. Who are you going to be? Mikhail Panarin?Yep, that's what you told them. Although, on the other hand, they also have enough brains to figure out that there are not many other little brothers in Europe. So enough excuses, you already slept to the fullest.Well Mikhail, well Panarin. Let's let go!They chuckle, but the block is not removed.Here you just have to wait patiently. Either way, you'll be missed soon. And if they wanted to kill, they certainly would have killed."Misha, listen again, the last attempt."Sounds pretty menacing when you think about it. Only a voice for some reason, well, sympathetic or something."Minute. Quartet. Visor. Orc. Podcaster.What is he carrying?! And most importantly, he pronounces it so deliberately, with a recitation."Nineteen. Ei
Corporation 30
The ship slept, as it had slept for the last five hundred watches.Immersed in the silence and twilight of the on-duty lighting, it looked more like a dead crypt of the ancient gods than a living and active artifact of an engineering genius.For the first time mankind took a step beyond its own world, it was to be a triumph, a heroic saga, about which legends will be composed among posterity. But in reality, the feat turned into a routine. This routine consisted of a painful succession of minutes, shifts, turns, years, monotonous and seemingly meaningless.And now, when Captain Shimizu left his post, finally bowing ceremoniously to his replacement, he was gnawed by a feeling of some kind of lost incompleteness. As if he, Captain Shimizu, had to do something, accomplish something, perform something. Not in this, so in the last watch. But he didn't. And this bothered him much more than the dead silence of the service corridors of the command sector.What could he, a mattaku, do? Why com
Corporation 31
If, from the side view, his opponent was simply deftly wielding a racket, not particularly straining and, in general, effortlessly deflecting any attempts to knock himself off the rhythm, now Captain Shimizu felt how these blows were directed by an experienced hand.It was as if it was not the racket that hit the ball, but the ball itself, in the most accurate way, ricocheted there, and there, as it was destined for it. No differences in gravity, microscopic surface irregularities or inaccuracies in the tension of the fishing line could affect the results - an economical movement of the brush, and the ball was already sent towards its fate.Captain Shimizu tried with all his might to intervene in the iron mechanism that he unwittingly had to face, to do at least something not according to the rules written by someone else's hand, but any of his attempts to bring his game into an attacking mode, to somehow violate the plans of a partner on the court , led to only one previously obvious
Corporation 32
Stanley tried not to raise his face. As soon as he forgot himself for a second and cast a glance into this gaping nothingness, something seemed to shrink in his head, and the picture before his eyes began to dance treacherous pretzels.What did he forget here?After the departure of Cyrus, Interweb did not immediately become like this. At one time, free songwriters continued to quietly frolic in the arenas, and Papa Doc broadcast his slanderous verses about “Lolita as a mirror of the cyberpunk revolution” from the pulpit for long nights. Those days are long gone, and only Stanley remembered how it was. Bright, passionate, bold. However, without the formidable power of the Corporation, its offspring was doomed to decline and neglect. As soon as Romulus and the Companions left the Sol system, something happened that should have happened. "Red-jackets" of all stripes began to coherently and methodically put pressure on everyone who dared to even allegorically mention the Interweb.This w
Corporation 33
Stanley had no idea what efforts and sacrifices it cost them, as they say, you know less, you sleep better, anyway, in response to any questions, neither the Companions nor the Guardians spoke plainly, habitually getting off with empty and streamlined speculations.And what, our business is small, write down what you see, and then throw it off to the Guardians.But even such meager knowledge was enough to draw their own conclusions.The time of life allotted to all of us has expired, no matter what the Companions do now, the noosphere of the Mother perished.And people died with it.No matter what the corporations and the corrupt authorities of the agglomerations that depend on them in everything, the situation over the next few years only got worse. Madmen with a bouquet of psychiatric diagnoses that were considered not coexisting in one head had nowhere to store. Only the heaviest and those who did not have relatives left at will were taken to the azilums. The rest, if possible, lay