"Gibson, William - Johnny Mnemonic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

sales pitch. 'Client's code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids,
which we in the trade don't like to talk about, there's no way to
recover your phrase. Can't drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don't
know it, never did.'
'Squids? Crawly things with arms?' We emerged into a deserted street
market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square
littered with fish heads and rotting fruit.
'Superconducting quantum interfence detectors. Used them in the war to
find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.'
'Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid'll read that chip of yours?'
She'd stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin
mirrors.
'Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth
the strenght of geomagnetic force; it's like pulling a whisper out of
cheering stadium.'
'Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.'
'But your data's still secure.' Pride in profession. 'No government'll
let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much
chance of interdepartmental funnies; they're too likely to watergate
you.'
'Navy stuff,' she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. 'Navy
stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name's Jones. I
think you'd better meet him. He's a junkie, though. So we'll have to
take him something.'
'A junkie?'
'A dolphin.'
He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he
might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly
in his galvanized tank. Water stopped over the side, wetting my shoes.
He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides,
a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor,
clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had
been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed
sections of his gray-white hide.
Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded doen
the side of the tank.
'What is this place?' I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting
chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden
framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.
'Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. "talk with the War Whale." All that.
Some whale Jones is...'
Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.
'How's he talk?' Suddenly I was anxious to go.
'Thta's the catch. Say "Hi," Jones.'
And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and
blue.

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