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

raided at gunpoint so many times that the owner invested in a bullet proof
glass pod like the Pope uses, and controlled entry and exit to his
premises electronically. He had also bought a serious South African
drum-magazined shotgun, which he kept under his till. He felt very safe,
until some enterprising youngsters burned him out with jellied petrol
bombs. Who said initiative was dead?
I cycled along the gravel and dirt to the side of the road as heavily
laden thirty wheelers thundered past, heading east into the Pennines,
their wash sending me wheeling into the scrubland as if I had been swatted
by a giant hand. Rain clouds massed in the dark sky over Yorkshire. Good -
a decent shower kept the dust down for a few days. We were never short of
a little rain.
The strip mall loomed in the chill October dusk, all harsh sodium and
technicolour neon tubing. An old double-decker bus retrofitted with
multiple axles was parked at an angle in front of Joe Swo's Diner, a tatty
American theme fastfood restaurant, and a gaggle of tourists were drinking
their Diet Cokes and soaking up the ambience of early twenty-first century
post-Collapse urban Manchester. I wondered how much they had paid to be
taken to a shit hole like this, probably the only stop off on the way to a
rural theme village in the Pennines. Maybe they thought that we were a
theme village too - a village themed on urban decay and social breakdown.
I parked my MTB close to a public fone booth and triple-locked it to a
lamppost. Inside Joe Swo's I could see Bobby and two kids of about the
same age, clustered around a dirt-streaked plastic table littered with
styrofoam food containers. One of the boys had a plastic bag with cables
and wiring hanging out of it, and they were passing bits back and forth
across the table. Two Jizz addicts shared an inhaler at a table nearby,
their eyes closed, oblivious to all around them. I hoped Bobby would
remember I needed more RAM for my deck but Christ only knew what he was
trading for it.
The public fone booth was a smooth plastic cylinder that stank of urine.
Why did people always piss in fone booths? It required a pfennig to enter
but the short blade on my Silverman tool and a deft turn clockwise usually
worked just as well. The door hissed open and I stepped inside.
Fone modulation was archaic and painfully slow but a whole lot safer than
using the public data jack socket, which spat little apps into your drive
and asked awkward questions of your system, questions that I didn't want
to answer. I set up my deck on the plastic shelf and fitted the 69'er
rubber couplers to the fone's earpiece and mouthpiece. I heard the dial
tones then the hiss of connection, and the sweet burst of surf. I was in.
I guess they must have given me fifteen seconds or so to log on to the
BankNet, just so they would have the satisfaction of catching me in the
act. Later, I would realise that they knew my modus operandii down to the
average number of keystrokes I made and my predicted behaviour under
stress. Nothing if not thorough were the Department of Data Security.
My first indication that something was wrong came when I saw through the
booth's scratched plastic windows the tourists scattering as if a wasp had
flown into their midst. As they cleared the pavement I saw what had made
them run - a navy blue armoured personnel carrier was driving up the
pavement through them and toward me at high speed, its fat tyres crunching