Cosmonaut Keep Read Online Free PDF Page B

back and looks over at her.
    "So," he says. "What's your problem?"
    She rubs her hand around the back of her neck. "I need a new passport, and new ID and an exit visa. Like, fast."
    "Ah." His eyes narrow. "You CIA?"
    "If I was," she says, "do you think I would tell you? Or need you to work for me?"
    He shrugs. "A deniable non-denial. That'll do me."
    It won't do me; in fact this whole question bothers me a lot, but I keep my mouth shut for the moment.
    They dicker over the deal's details and the spec while I set up my first shot. I move the cue too fast -- almost as fast as the slow light. The Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction shortens the tip by a foot and I miss completely.
    "Damn."
    Jason swoops over the baize, leaving me in a tricky position, but not quite irretrievable.
    "Why's everyone in so early?" I ask.
    Jason grunts. "All the transatlantic connections have been very choppy today."
    "Yeah, tell me about it," I say sourly.
    "And not much bloody work coming in."
    "Aha," I say, chalking the cue. "Interesting."
    I pull off a neat relativistic shot: allowing for the contraction, slamming the cue ball hard, cannoning one of the small, light ultraviolets so fast that its mass increases enough to shift one of the greens, which does a slingshot around one of the corner-pocket black holes and sets up a few other balls it collides with to snooker Jason's next ...
    But he manages a comeback and clears me off completely.
    "Again?" I reach for the Schrödinger box.
    "Nah." He shakes his head. "Gotta work. Mind if we stay in here for a bit?"
    "No problem."
    Jadey ducks out into the real world for another round. Jason flexes his fingers. A long, low table trundles through one of the virtual doorways and comes to a halt beside us just as Jadey returns with our pints.
    "Don't put them down there," Jason reminds her, just in time. The big table, conjured from his own softwear, can stop his data-gloved hand, but ours -- and any other real-world object, of course -- would just pass through it. Jadey places the drinks on the real games-table and we watch Jason work. He turns for a moment, frames Jadey's face with his fingers, then places the resulting portrait on the flat and begins morphing it: from passport photo back through employment ID, graduation pic, prom, grade-school group picture, baby ... Other cards and pictures pop up on the surface of the big table, and he shuffles and slides them around with expert speed. Before our eyes a whole new biography of Jadey comes together, from maternity ward to tourist ticket. He sweeps them up into one stack, taps the edges on the table, and makes them vanish up his sleeve.
    Dismisses the table and turns to me, with a broad wink at Jadey.
    "Time to make it real," he says. "One for the code-geeks."
    Old programmers never die. They just move over to legacy systems.
    They even look that way. Early adopters to the last, they don't pop telomere tabs and mitochondrial mixers like the rest of us -- no, they have to try out untried biotech, so they tend to look a bit patchy: gray skins-and-smooth beards sort of thing. Jadey, Jason, and I circle cautiously around the edge of a raucous, twenty-strong clot of the old villains, all quaffing beer and talking at the tops of their voices.
    "What's with the fucking news?" someone's saying, shaking his head and blinking hard. "I can't get CNN, can't even get Slash-dot ... "
    This particular clique aren't all programmers. Sometime half a century ago, back in the nineties, their social circle overlapped that of the Scottish literary intelligentsia. Neither group's fashion sense has exactly moved with the times. The writers wear variously distressed jackets in fake-prolo denim or fake-macho leather; the coders go more for multipocketed waistcoats laden with the hardware for hardware fixes -- Gerber and Leatherman multitools, Victorinox Swiss Army knives, Maglite torches, and over-faded trade-fair T-shirts: Sun, Bull, HP, Oracle, Microsoft ... This isn't irony, this