"Gibson, William- CyberPunk 1- Neuromancer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

He stared at her. "So tell me what you know about Armi-tage."
"For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any Screaming Fist. I checked. But that doesn't mean much. He doesn't look like any of the pics of the guys who got out." She shrugged. "Big deal. And starters is all I got." She drummed her nails on the back of the chair. "But you are a cowboy, aren't you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around." She smiled.
"He'd kill me."
"Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real bad. Besides, you're a clever john, no? You can winkle him, sure."
"What else is on that list you mentioned?" "Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name of Peter Riviera. Real ugly customer."
"Where's he?"
"Dun no. But he's one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile." She made a face. "God awful." She stood up and stretched, catlike. "So we got an axis going, boy? We're together in this? Partners?"
Case looked at her. "I gotta lotta choice, huh?"
She laughed. "You got it, cowboy."
"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military ex-perimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimen-sional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of log-arithmic spirals- cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire con. trot circuits of tanks and war planes. "Cyberspace. A con se-nsual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathe-matical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Un-thinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...."
"What's that?" Molly asked, as he flipped the channel se-lector.
"Kid's show." A discontinuous flood of images as the se-lector cycled. "Off," he said to the Hosaka. "You want to try now, Case?"
Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with Molly beside him. "You want me to go out, Case? Maybe easier for you, alone...." He shook his head. "No. Stay, doesn't matter." He settled the black terry sweat-band across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center. closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud. And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information. Please, he prayed, now-
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now-

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of palergray. Expanding-And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Au-thority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
Molly was gone when he took the erodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for five hours. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new work-tables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black silk sleeping bag over his head.
The security package taped to the steel fire door bleeped twice. "Entry requested," it said. "Subject is cleared per my program."
"So open it." Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage. "Christ," said a hoarse voice, "I know that bitch can see in the dark...." A squat figure stepped in and closed the door. "Turn the lights on, okay?" Case scrambled off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch.
"I'm the Finn," said the Finn, and made a warning face at Case.
"Case."
"Pleased to meecha, I'm sure. I'm doing some hardware for your boss, it looks like." The Finn fished a pack of Partagas from a pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the room. He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono-Sendai. "Looks stock. Soon fix that. But here is your problem, kid." He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket, flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rec-tangle from the envelope. "Goddamn factory prototypes," he said, tossing the thing down on the table. "Cast 'em into a block of polycarbon, can't get in with a laser without frying the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows what else. We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked, right?" He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it away in an inside pocket.
"What is it?"
"It's a flip flop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai here, you can access live or recorded Sims Tim without having to jack out of the matrix."
"What for?"
"I haven't got a clue. Know I'm fitting Moll for a broadcast rig, though, so it's probably her sensorium you'll access." The Finn scratched his chin. "So now you get to find out just how tight those jeans really are, huh?"

4
Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that filtered through the grid overhead. A countdown was in pro-gress in one corner of the monitor screen. Cowboys didn't get into Simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a Simstim deck were bas-ically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but Simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment, you didn't feel it.
The screen bleeped a two-second warning. The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of fiber optics.
And one and two and-
Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points.
Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work ont....
Then he keyed the new switch.
The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color.... She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the pas-senger behind her eyes.
The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought.
Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room.
"How you doing, Case?" He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply.
Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating.
The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library, automatically counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright. He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black, afterward....
Her destination was one of the dubious software rental com-plexes that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush. Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white card-board. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear.
"Larry, you in, man?" She positioned herself in front of him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail . "Hey, Larry."
"Molly." He nodded.
"I have some work for some of your friends, Larry." Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sport shirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed.
"Molly's got a rider," he said, "and Larry doesn't like that."
"Hey," she said, "I didn't know you were so . . . sensitive.
I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive." "I know you, lady?" The blank look returned. "You looking to buy some softs?"
"I'm looking for the Moderns."