Asher, Neal / Эшер, Нил - Собрание сочинений (95 произведений) [1992-2025, fb2/epub, ENG]

Mindgames: Fool's Mate 2018, epub (retail), Neal Asher The Parasite 2011, epub (retail), Neal Asher Cowl 2009, epub (retail), ISBN: 978-0-330-46485-7, Tor UK Africa Zero 2005, epub, ISBN: 1-58715-447-1, Wildside Press

The Engineer ReConditioned 2014, epub (retail), ISBN: 978-1-4344-4273-4, Wildside Press Owning the Future 2018, epub (retail), Neal Asher

Alternative Hospital 1998, fb2 Sucker 1999, fb2 Watchcrab 2003, fb2 Plastipak™ Limited 2003, fb2 Check Elastic Before Jumping 2007, fb2 Recoper 2007, fb2 Bad Travelling 2008, fb2

The People Rule

Throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, Internet blogs and news groups displaced the slow, moribund and politically tribal newspapers. As Internet technology became easier to use, TV news incorporated itself into it to survive, thus also sliding out of political control. However, as politicians worked diligently to weld together the main blocks of world nations into a coherent and oppressive whole, and their grip on people’s everyday lives grew steadily tighter, governments increasingly monitored, censored and stifled the Internet. Consequently, the stories appearing on the main news services only infrequently strayed out of approved bounds. The news returned to being either a mouthpiece for the main parties or else one hundred per cent tabloid pap. The twenty-fifth Mars mission, in 2124, of course got plenty of airtime, as the then slightly antiquated Mars Traveller VI sped on past Mars to be cannibalized within the asteroid belt, its fusion engine dismounted and attached to an asteroid consisting almost completely of metals, and that was blasted back to near-Earth orbit. In that time, the nations of the two main political blocks were steadily sacrificing individual power to a massive, corrupt and hugely wasteful centralized government, so what didn’t make it to the main news was that funding for further Mars missions had meanwhile dried up, as the steadily expanding bureaucracy of what developed into the Committee – a totalitarian world government – leached up increasingly scarce world resources.

The gene bank squatted next to the Leuven monorail: a fat cylinder half a kilometre tall sitting just on the fringes of the government sub-city comprising 90 per cent of the Brussels urban sprawl. Because of its supposedly apolitical purpose, the bank didn’t warrant Inspectorate guards – its security system consisting of old-style palm and retinal scanners. However, if there was a problem here the Inspectorate could get a unit of enforcers on site within minutes and, Alan Saul noted while he swept past crowded pavements in his stolen car, other more frightening security patrolled the area. The three tall shepherds strode into view from behind the gene bank just as he turned into a slipway leading up to the staff car park. These sinister machines were fashioned of gleaming metal and white plastic. They each stood on four spider legs, their knee joints rising a metre above their inverted teardrop, tick-like bodies. Saul spotted that while two of them had their crowd-control gear neatly folded in below their smooth bodies, one of them had a man bound up in its adhesive tentacles, his arms and legs hanging slackly. Obviously the robots were on their way back from a food riot, and this one had yet to deliver its captured subversive to the Inspectorate. They moved on out of sight, stepping delicately through crowds cramming an urban pedway over that way. . . .

Fate had conspired to leave him with one working and clear eye, and just enough muscle in his neck with which to raise his head and look at what remained of his body. There wasn’t a lot of it. Not that he believed in fate, of course – well, not in any vague religious, supernatural sense. He rather felt that Fate in his particular case had a name still spoken of with awe – and of course the retrospective, spectator-titillation of those who weren’t there when a particular black AI started fucking with causality, or didn’t have any skin in the game. Smoking rubble lay all around him: chunks of composite, shards of ceramal, foamstone that had apparently heated up enough to melt, and drifts of ash still glowing red inside. Thick, heavy smoke boiled through the air and each heaving breath he took failed to draw enough oxygen into his lungs. Even so, he could see that his legs and arms were gone, while his torso looked like a pork roast, nicely prepared and shaped into a neat cylinder, but having been shoved into an oven that was far too hot. It surprised him that he could feel no pain, until he did. Then he transitioned into the nightmare of not having enough air to breathe and not enough with which to scream. Again. . . .