"William Gibson - Pattern Recognition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

Numb here in the semiтИТdark, in Damien's bedroom, beneath a silvery thing the color of oven mitts, probably
never intended by its makers to actually be slept under. She'd been too tired to find a blanket. The sheets
between her skin and the weight of this industrial coverlet are silky some luxurious thread count, and they
smell faintly of, she guesses,

Damien. Not badly, though. Actually it's not unpleasant; any physical linkage to a fellow mammal seems a
plus at this point.

Damien is a friend.

Their boyтИТgirl Lego doesn't click, he would say.

Damien is thirty, Cayce two years older, but there is some carefully insulated module of immaturity in him,
some shy and stubborn thing that frightened the money people. Both have been very good at what they've
done, neither seeming to have the least idea of why.

Google Damien and you will find a director of music videos and commercials. Google Cayce and you will
find "coolhunter," and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a "sensitive" of some kind, a
dowser in the world of global marketing.

Though the truth, Damien would say, is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the
semiotics of the marketplace.


4 1. THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT
 Pattern Recognition
Damien's in Russia now, avoiding renovation and claiming to be shooting a documentary. Whatever faintly
livedтИТin feel the place now has, Cayce knows, is the work of a production assistant.

She rolls over, abandoning this pointless parody of sleep. Gropes for her clothes. A small boy's black Fruit Of
The Loom TтИТshirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray VтИТnecked pullover purchased by the halfтИТdozen from a
supplier to New England prep schools, and a new and oversized pair of black 501's, every trademark carefully
removed. Even the buttons on these have been ground flat, featureless, by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in the
Village, a week ago.

The switch on Damien's Italian floor lamp feels alien: a different click, designed to hold back a different
voltage, foreign British electricity.

Standing now, stepping into her jeans, she straightens, shivering.

MirrorтИТworld. The plugs on appliances are huge, tripleтИТpronged, for a species of current that only powers
electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight,
a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.

Pupils contracted painfully against sunтИТbright halogen, she squints into an actual mirror, canted against a gray
wall, awaiting hanging, wherein she sees a blackтИТlegged, disjointed puppet, sleepтИТhair poking up like a toilet
brush. She grimaces at it, thinking for some reason of a boyfriend who'd insisted on comparing her to Helmut
Newton's nude portrait of Jane Birkin.