Цитаты из книги Crosstalk

“You can still talk to us—”

“It’s not the same!” Maeve wailed. “I could talk to you anywhere! I hate not having that anymore.”

«How horrible to have had that tidal wave of thoughts and emotions crash in on him without any idea of what was causing it—and without anyone to rescue him or reassure him he wasn’t going crazy, or teach him how to build defenses! Or to hold his hand safely to their heart while he slept.

It was cold on the street. She shivered in the sleeveless green dress, and before she realized that C.B. had let go of her hand, he’d taken off his denim jacket and draped it over her shoulders.

“I can’t take your jacket—” she began.

“It’s protective coloration,” he said, “so we don’t look quite so mismatched.”

“You mean like an escaped mental patient and her keeper?” she asked, glancing down at her hopelessly wrinkled dress.

“No, like the prom queen and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Put it on,” he ordered, and while she did, he opened the back door and began rummaging in the car. He straightened up and looked at her appraisingly. “Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “Still too gorgeous for the likes of me. Come on, my Irish colleen.”

Do you know how many people die on the operating table during brain surgery every year?”

“I told you, it’s not brain surgery. It’s a minor en—”

“Fine. Do you know how many people die from”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“‘minor enhancements’? Haven’t you ever seen those pictures on TMZ where the starlet’s nose has slid halfway down her face, under the headline COSMETIC SURGERY GONE WRONG?”

“An EED is not cosmetic surgery.”

“Then why has everyone in Hollywood had one? Or you could get a secondary infection like staph or flesh-eating bacteria.Hospitals are breeding grounds for those things. They’re horrible places—bedpans, catheters, gowns that open in the back. I avoid them like the plague, and you should, too.”

“I—”

“Or they could give you too much anesthetic. Or, even worse, your surgery could go great and work exactly like it’s supposed to, because telepathy’s a terrible idea—”

“It’s not telepathy—” she attempted to interject, but he went right on.

“You don’t want to know. Trust me. Especially what guys think. It’s like a cesspool in there. I mean, it’s even worse than the stuff they say on the internet, and you know how bad that is.”

“We are supposed to be talking about whether your proposals are ready—”

“I am,” he said. “Commspan promises the same thing—more communication. But that isn’t what people want. They’ve got way too much already—laptops, smartphones, tablets, social media. They’ve got connectivity coming out their ears. There’s such a thing as being too connected, you know, especially when it comes to relationships. Relationships need less communication, not more.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Wanna bet? Then why does every sentence beginning ‘We need to talk’ end in disaster? Our whole evolutionary history has been about trying to stop information from getting communicated—camouflage, protective coloration, that ink that squids squirt, encrypted passwords, corporate secrets, lying. Especially lying. If people really wanted to communicate, they’d tell the truth, but they don’t.”

“That’s not true,” she said and then remembered texting her family that she was in a meeting and telling Rahul Deshnev’s assistant her nine forty-five appointment was there.

“They lie constantly,” C.B. was saying, “on Facebook, on eHarmony, in person. ‘Yes, the report’s done. I’m just putting the finishing touches on it.’ ‘No, I don’t think that dress makes you look fat.’ ‘Of course I want to go.’ ‘Of course’ is a dead giveaway that you’re lying. ‘Of course I didn’t sleep with her.’ ‘Of course I like your family.’ ‘Of course you can trust me.’ ”

“C.B.—”

“And you know who people lie to the most? Themselves. They’re absolute masters of self-deception. So even if you have this IED and can hear Trent’s thoughts, what good will it do?”

“You can’t hear other people’s—” she said, frustrated. “I told you, the EED doesn’t make you telepathic! All it does is enhance your ability to sense your partner’s feelings.”

“Which are even less reliable than thoughts! People have all kinds of crazy feelings—revenge, jealousy, hatred, rage. Haven’t you ever felt like murdering someone?”

Yes, Briddey thought. I feel like it right now.

“But your having murderous feelings doesn’t make you a murderer. And having nice ones doesn’t make you a saint. I’ll bet even Hitler had warm, fuzzy feelings when he thought about his dog, and if you happened to pick up his emotions right then, you’d think, What a nice guy! Plus, people have no idea what they feel. They convince themselves they’re in love when they’re not, they—”

“I did not come down here to hear your theories on love,” she said. “Or Hitler. I came down here because I assumed you wanted to tell me something about your proposals for the new phone.”

“That’s what I’ve been talking about, my proposals for the phone. What people really need is less communication, not more.”

«...And if you want my opinion, I think you’ve lost your mind. Don’t you already have enough information bombarding you, what with emails and texting and Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram? And now you’re going to have brain surgery so you can hear more?”

“The EED’s not brain surgery. It’s a minor enhancement procedure—”

“Where they drill a hole in your head so all your sense can leak out. Only you don’t need to have that done because it’s obvious yours already has! Do you have any idea how dangerous an IED is?”

“EED,” she corrected him. “An IED is a kind of bomb.”

“Yes, well, wait till it blows up in your face,” he said. “What if the scalpel slips and the doctor cuts the wrong nerve? You could end up paralyzed. Or a vegeta—”

“It’s a completely safe procedure. Dr. Verrick’s performed hundreds of EEDs without anything bad happening.”

“To him. He’s making a pile of money convincing couples they’ll be able to read each other’s minds».

«She woke abruptly to even deeper darkness, convinced she’d heard something, though the room was completely silent. Middle-of-the-night silent, she thought, and reached for the clock. Three A.M. C.B.’s time of day.

C.B.? she called hopefully into the darkness. Are you there?

Nothing.

And it wasn’t a voice, she thought, staring into the darkness, trying to reconstruct the sound in her head. Or a noise. It had been a sudden cessation of sound, like the stopping of a refrigerator’s hum. Or a car outside switching off its engine.