"Gibson, William- CyberPunk 3- Mona Lisa Overdrive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

Because she wanted, now she really knew she wanted, to lick her fingers.
Later that day, in a gray afternoon, she found a corrugated plastic shipping canister in the garage, carried it up to the bedroom, and began to pack Bobby's remaining things. There wasn't much: a pair of leather jeans he hadn't liked, some shirts he'd either discarded or forgotten, and, in the teak bureau's bottom drawer, a cyberspace deck. It was an Ono-Sendai, hardly more than a toy. It lay amid a tangle of black leads, a cheap set of stim-trodes, a greasy-looking plastic tube of saline paste.
She remembered the deck he'd used, the one he'd taken with him, a gray factory-custom Hosaka with unmarked keys. It was a cowboy's deck; he'd insisted on traveling with it, even though it caused problems during customs checks. Why, she wondered, had he bought the Ono-Sendai? And why had he abandoned it? She was seated on the edge of the bed; she lifted the deck from the drawer and put it on her lap.
Her father, long ago, in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in. You don't need it, he'd said. And she hadn't, because she'd dreamed cyberspace, as though the neon gridlines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids.
There's no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor's lecture in the arcology's executive crшche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive "virtual world" technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile feedback gloves providing a touch-world of studs and triggers . . . As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied . . .
She leaned forward and picked up the trode-set, shook it to free its leads from the tangle.
No there, there.
She spread the elastic headband and settled the trodes across her temples - one of the world's characteristic human gestures, but one she seldom performed. She tapped the Ono-Sendai's battery-test stud. Green for go. She touched the power stud and the bedroom vanished behind a colorless wall of sensory static. Her head filled with a torrent of white sound.
Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.
"Angela," the house said, its voice quiet but compelling, "I have a call from Hilton Swift . . ."
"Executive override?" She was eating baked beans and toast at the kitchen counter.
"No," it said, confidingly.
"Change your tone," she said, around a mouthful of beans. "Something with an edge of anxiety."
"Mr. Swift is waiting," the house said nervously.
"Better," she said, carrying bowl and plate to the washer, "but I want something closer to genuine hysteria . . ."
"Will you take the call?" The voice was choked with tension.
"No," she said, "but keep your voice that way, I like it."
She walked into the living room, counting under her breath. Twelve, thirteen . . .
"Angela," the house said gently, "I have a call from Hilton Swift - "
"On executive override," Swift said.
She made a farting sound with her lips.
"You know I respect your need to be alone, but I worry about you."
"I'm fine, Hilton. You needn't worry. Bye-bye."
"You stumbled this morning, on the beach. You seemed disoriented. Your nose began to bleed."
"I had a nosebleed."
"We want you to have another physical . . ."
"Great."
"You accessed the matrix today, Angie. We logged you in the BAMA industrial sector."
"Is that what it was?"
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"There isn't anything to talk about. I was just screwing around. You want to know, though? I was packing some crap Bobby left here. You'd have approved, Hilton! I found a deck of his and I tried it. I punched a key, sat there looking around, jacked out."
"I'm sorry, Angie."
"For what?"
"For disturbing you. I'll go now."
"Hilton, do you know where Bobby is?"
"No."
"You telling me Net security hasn't kept tabs on him?"
"I'm telling you I don't know, Angie. That's the truth."
"Could you find out, if you wanted to?"
Another pause. "I don't know. If I could, I'm not sure that I would."
"Thanks. Goodbye, Hilton."
"Goodbye, Angie."

She sat on the deck that night, in the dark, watching the fleas dance against floodlit sand. Thinking of Brigitte and her warning, of the drug in the jacket and the derm charger in the medicine cabinet. Thinking of cyberspace and the sad confinement she'd felt with the Ono-Sendai, so far from the freedom of the loa.
Thinking of the other's dreams, of corridors winding in upon themselves, muted tints of ancient carpet . . . An old man, a head made of jewels, a taut pale face with eyes that were mirrors . . . And a beach in the wind and dark.
Not this beach, not Malibu.
And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep.
Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine:
T-A
"Call Continuity," she told the house, over a third cup of coffee.