"Noel K Hannan - Divide By Zero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hannan Noel K)

evidence that could be tailed back to the assassin given a sufficiently
talented or just downright tenacious DDS agent. Besides, I had not tripped
the tracer - it had been one of Dickens' other little helpers that was
abroad that night, jacked into the same LAN as me. Maybe Schonigen or
Dykstra, both Graficals (snigger) from the Westside. So it would have been
foolish of me to step in and zap the tracer on their behalf, and risk
copping the flak for it. Far better for me to jack out and carry on my
work through a fone modulator in a public booth, as per Dickens'
instructions. So that's what I did.
I gathered up my deck into a black nylon despatch bag and sealed it
tightly with velcro webbing. My MTB was in the hall, covered in a pale
grey concrete dust like everything else in here. I passed between mum and
the teevee as I pulled on my bubble jacket and made my way out. She
grunted as I blocked her view of the screen for what must have been half a
second. I couldn't bear to look at her anymore. She must have been a
hundred and twenty kilos. All she ever did was eat, shit and watch teevee.
I guess she was 'mum' in the biological sense only. Bobby and me had been
feeding and educating ourselves for more time than I care to remember. She
just shared our house like some vast beached sea creature, consuming too
much of every resource we had - power, food, air, water - and putting
nothing back into the loop.
An MTB was the only way of getting around on the estate. Cars and
motorbikes rattled to bits on the broken concrete hardpan within days. My
MTB had pneumatic shockers front and rear. The guy I took it off fought
hard and I had had to cut him. Maybe he had cut the person he took it
from. Law of the jungle.
Our 'estate' was just that - an old industrial estate from the time when
we actually made things, not just consumed them, retail units that had
lain derelict for a decade since the Collapse until the Americans came and
some bright spark decided to carve them up into housing units to cage up
the growing bands of the Dispossessed who clogged the arteries of the
country. Imagine living in a cement factory with asbestos walls and
crushed glass carpeting and you'll get a pretty good idea of what it was
like. Those of us born here had lung shadows like kids elsewhere had
freckles. Even the incessant rain did little to keep the dust down,
especially inside. Life expectancy wasn't too long so you fitted in what
you could. I had done well to get to seventeen without major surgery (not
that we could have afforded any). Bobby wasn't shaping up to be so lucky -
he was only thirteen and had started to cough up ugly black clots of
blood. I gave him two years, tops. Shame, he was a good kid. He was just
starting to get interested in the underground movement AvaloNet, which
conducted a campaign of violent resistance to any American interference in
British affairs, an organisation that I viewed with some suspicion. But
Bobby seemed to think they had something to say and was talking about
joining their youth wing. I didn't want to see him planting bombs under US
marines' cars or hacking intelligence systems on AvaloNet's sayso, but I
hoped he would live long enough to make that choice for himself.
A wide stretch of black tarmac led from the estate to a strip mall that
was our town centre, shopping and meeting place, and the focal point of
our 'community', if you could call us that. The off-licence had been