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

In the kitchen she runs tap water through a German filter, into an Italian electric kettle. Fiddles with switches,
one on the kettle, one on the plug, one on the socket. Blankly surveys the canary expanse of laminated
cabinetry while it boils. Bag of some imported Californian tea substitute in a large white mug. Pouring boiling
water.

In the flat's main room, she finds that Damien's faithful Cube is on, but sleeping, the nightтИТlight glow of its
static switches pulsing gently. Damien's ambivalence toward design showing here: He won't allow decorators
through the door unless they basically agree to not do that which they do, yet he holds on to this Mac for the
way you can turn it upside down and remove its innards with a magic little aluminum handle. Like the sex of
one of the robot girls in his video, now that she thinks of it.

She seats herself in his highтИТbacked workstation chair and clicks the transparent mouse. Stutter of infrared on
the pale wood of the long trestle table. The browser comes up. She types Fetish:Footage:Forum, which
Damien, determined to avoid contamination, will never bookmark.

The front page opens, familiar as a friend's living room. A frameтИТgrab from #48 serves as backdrop, dim and
almost monochrome, no characters in view. This is one of the sequences that generate comparisons with
Tarkovsky. She only knows Tarkovsky from stills, really, though she did once fall asleep during a screening
of The Stalker, going under on an endless pan, the camera aimed straight down, in closeтИТup, at a puddle on a
ruined mosaic floor. But she is not one of those who think that much will be gained by analysis of the maker's
imagined influences. The cult of the footage is rife with subcults, claiming every possible influence. Truffaut,
Peckinpah The Peckinpah people, among the least likely, are still waiting for the guns to be drawn.

She enters the forum itself now, automatically scanning titles of the posts and names of posters in the newer
threads, looking for friends, enemies, news. One thing is clear, though; no new footage has surfaced. Nothing
since that beach pan, and she does not subscribe to the theory that it is Cannes in winter. French footageheads
have been unable to match it, in spite of countless hours recording pans across approximately similar scenery.


1. THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT 5
 Pattern Recognition

She also sees that her friend Parkaboy is back in Chicago, home from an Amtrak vacation, California, but
when she opens his post she sees that he's only saying hello, literally.

She clicks Respond, declares herself CayceP.

Hi Parkaboy. nt

When she returns to the forum page, her post is there.

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in
her life, like a familiar cafe that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.

There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of lurkers.
And right now there are three people in Chat, but there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in
there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitchтИТdark
cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines
in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counterтИТpurposes, deter her.