"Paul Di Filippo - Daydream Nation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

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Cirri's face went hot. She felt cheap and easy. Her heart captured by off-the-shelf dreamware! She
debated confronting Ken instantly with her discovery. But in the end, she had kept silent. Surely the
reciprocal attraction she and Ken felt for each other was unchanged, even if he hadn't compiled the
winning iDream personally. Theirs was hardly the first romance that had begun with a little fib, yet gone
on to happy longevity.

Now the trash-chute door slammed shut on his trash. Cirri turned back down the corridor to her
apartment, went directly to her nightstand. From a small, dusty box similar to a contact-lens case, she
took a fresh iDreams bindi, a self-adhesive circlet displaying the iDreams logo: a stylised human head
wreathed in fluffy clouds and displaying a Third Eye. This she applied to her forehead an inch or two
above the bridge of her nose. Cirri docked her long-unused iDreamsCaster for charging, cabled it to her
computer. She uploaded several of her favourite iDreams into the machine while its batteries were being
replenished. Only then did she turn her attention to her closet, in search of the perfect outfit.

It was still a Saturday, after all, and she'd be damned if she'd stay home all weepy and self-pitying, when
there was a city's worth of dreams to be shared.

The club's lighting was so dim that Cirri could hardly distinguish anyone's iDreams bindi unless she were
practically on top of the person. You couldn't just assume that anyone wearing a paste-on circle on their
brow was open to your dreamcast. With the popularity of iDreams, various reactionary bindis had
become fashionable. One of the most common showed a head wrapped in chains, while another
displayed a head protected by a halo. Zap one of these folks, who almost seemed to court such mistaken
encounters as excuses to vent their bile regarding iDreams, and you could find yourself on the wrong end
of a civil lawsuit.

So Cirri had almost to climb into the lap of the brawny red-haired guy on the stool next to hers before
she could be sure he was a dreamer too. When they had mutely acknowledged their kinship with a smile
- the Chechen country-crunk music filling the club was amped up to 11, and made talking impossible -
the guy nodded to Cirri that she should go first. A good sign.

Cirri sent him the most recent iDream she had assembled in DreamShop. Many of its components
derived from the standard toolkit, but she had incorporated an emotional track reverse-engineered from
her own brain. The sequence revolved around a dance contest which she and her partner won with a
flurry of outrageous moves, earning massive audience acclaim.

The guy reacted positively enough, although without any signs of extreme enthusiasm. Then he sent Cirri
his iDream.

Cirri subscribed to Nerve and Fleshbot. She was open to kinky suggestions from her lovers. She never
missed an episode of Desperate Soprano Wives. But the raw libidinous crudeness of the iDream that Big
Red sent her shocked her like grabbing a live wire. That part involving the donkey-derived chimera ...

Cirri had hopped off her barstool before she even realised she had commanded her body to move. She
hastened to the opposite end of the club, face burning.

It took Cirri several hours and a few drinks before she tried exchanging any more dreams.

What she got back for her earnest efforts were dreams that ranged the spectrum from passive and wimpy