Pandora Driver: The Origin полностью

Chalk tapped and chirped out words on the slate as she worked out the problem like she had seen the Professor do. She made lists, and connected the ideas, and looked for a solution to a practical moral equation.

She began with the Ten Commandments as she learned them at Citadel Catholic High.

She commented as she progressed, "These three seemed like rules to control primitive people, I wasn't sure how they fit in the modern world."

"My father was dead, and my mother was insane. I was on my own. Even if that weren't the case, respect was something that had to be earned. Obedience shouldn’t be given blindly to anyone."

The weight of these words struck her. She circled them.

"They were good ideas and I would abide by them under normal circumstances, but I needed these tools of deception. They came in handy when fighting monsters. Villains didn't play fair so I couldn't afford to be bound by one-sided rules. They needed to be broken from time to time for the greater good."

"I assumed that number eight included lying, which I was inclined to do. Stealing from thieves didn’t feel like stealing. Wasn’t that a double negative becoming a positive? Or was it two wrongs don’t make a right?"

"I'm a woman on a farm in the middle of nowhere and I’m not concerned with material things beyond survival. These didn't seem to apply to me."

The killing commandment was the one that resonated with her.

From one of her schoolbooks, she wrote out the seven deadly sins.

She circled greed. Then she added their countering virtues.

She circled hope, and crossed out temperance. She could afford to be restrained.

Then she filled in the sin list with a few more that landed people in one of the nine rings of hell, according to Dante.

The people who refused to take a stand in life were punished at the gates of hell. They were stung by wasps for all eternity.

Ring one was a limbo for those of unfulfilled desire and hopelessness.

Ring four was for the prodigal and the miserly and punished hoarders and wasters.

Ring five was for the wrathful and the sullen. She laughed to herself. "This was my daily state."

Ring six burned the heretics.

Ring seven soaked the violent, the suicides, blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers in a river of boiling blood. She circled the usurers.

Ring eight punished the frauds.

Ring nine was for the treacherous, betrayers, traitors against country, and cannibals. She circled the entire ninth ring. These were her prime targets, although she didn't expect to ever run into any cannibals.

She continued to introduce ideas into the tangled chalk words.

She added:

She connected concepts from list to list, from source to source. Some concepts clearly added up like: Greed + Usury + It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God = Monster.

Other things didn't. Honor thy Father and thy Mother + If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother, he cannot be my disciple = What?

Then there was some stuff was just plain weird.

Don't cut your hair nor shave.

People who have flat noses, or is blind or lame, cannot go to an altar of God

Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you. “So it was amoral to eat lobster?”

From the Greeks she added.

Finally, she curled up with a book of Aesop’s fables, in a big chair. As she read each story, their morals were taken to the board and the long since dead Greek's words of advice lived again.