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

it carefully between thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward
the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as steel teeth slash
laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments.

Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her casette is n the deck ready
for playback. Some women's tapes disorients him, but he doubts this is the
reason he now hesitates to start the machine.

Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the
subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast
ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to capture
this segment of the audience.

But Angela's own tapes have never intimidated him before. (But what if she
has recorded a lover?) No, that can't be it - it's simply that the casette
is an entirely unknown quantity.

When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to the American
subsidiary of a Japanise plastics combine. At the time, he felt fortunate;
the ratio of applicants to indentured trainees was enormous. For three
years he lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company hymns in
formation each morning and usually managing to go over the compound fence
at least once a month for girls or the holodrome.

The indenture would have terminated on his twentieth birthday, leaving him
eligible for full employee status. A week before his nineteenth birthday,
with two stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over the
fence for the last time. He arrived in California three days before the
chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. In San Fransisco, warring
splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. One or another of four
different 'provisional' city governements had done such an efficient job of
stockpiling food that almost none was available at street level

Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burned out Tucson
suburb, making love to a thin teenager from New Jersey who explained the
finer points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent weeping that
seemed to have nothing at all to do with anything he did or said.

Years later he realized that he no longer had any idea of his original
motive in breaking his indenture.

The first three quarters of the cassette had been erased; you punch
yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and
scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound - the
no-sound of the first dark sea . . . (Prolonged input from wiped tape can
induce hypnagogic hallucination.)

Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a
tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed
from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet