"(ebook txt) William Gibson - Fragments of a Hologram Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

Morning's recorded dream, fading: through other eyes, dark plume of a Cuban
freighter - fading with the horizon it navigates across the mind's gray
screen.

Three in the morning.

Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat schematic images. What you
said - what she said - watching her pack - dialing the cab. However you
shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hieroglyphs converging on
a central component: you, standing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.

The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss. The cabby called you
an asshole; you still had to pay twice the fare. She had three pieces of
luggage. In his respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He
pedaled away in the rain. She didn't look back.

The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you the finger.

Parker saw his first ASP unit in Texas shantytown called Judy's Jungle. It
was a massive console in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into
the shot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital
spa, trampoining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old
Vogue model - heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun
than a hot bath.

Hewas in New York with forged papers a year later, when two leading firms
had the first portable decks in major department stores in time for
Christmas. The ASP porn theathers that had boomed briefly in California
never recovered.

Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller domes that had been the holo
temples of Parker's childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed
dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the old consoles, under
faded neon pulsing APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of
cigarette smoke.

Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for broadcast ASP, programming
the eye movements of the industry's human cameras.

The brown-out continues.

In the bedroom, Parker prods the brushed-aluminium face of his Sendai
Sleep-Master. Its pilot light flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffe in
hand, he crosses the carpet to the closet he emptied the day before. The
flashlight's beam probes the bare shelves for evidence of love, finding a
broken leather sandal strap, an ASP cassette, and a postcard. The postcard
is a white light reflection hologram of a rose.

At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the disposal unit.
Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains, but swallows and digests. Holding