"Stephen Kenson - Technobabel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenson Stephen)

Prologue
The year is 2059 . . .
Magic has returned to the world after an absence of thousands of years. What
the Mayan calendar called the Fifth World has given way to the Sixth, a new
cycle of magic, marked by the waking of the great dragon Ryumyo in the year
2011. The Sixth World is an age of magic and high technology. The age of
Shadowrun.
The rising magic has caused the Earth to Awaken. The ancient races have
re-emerged, throwing off their human guises. First came the elves and dwarfs,
born to human parents. Then came the orks and the trolls, some born different
like the elves and dwarfs, others transformed, twisted from human form into
their true selves as the rising magic activated their DNA. Dragons and other
creatures out of fantasy appeared in the skies and in the wilderness. Unknown
to the people of the twenty-first century, some of these folk and creatures
out of fantasy recall an earlier world where magic reigned supreme, long
before the earliest of recorded history. They know secrets that make them
powerful in this new Age of Magic.
The Sixth World is a strange blend of the arcane and the technological. The
march of technology has become a race. The distinction between man and machine
is blurred by the power of cybertechnology. Machine and computer implants are
commonplace, a mating of flesh and machine. People of the Sixth World are a
new breed; stronger, smarter, faster. Less human.
The Matrix has emerged like a phoenix from the ashes of the old global
computer network. A virtual world of

computer-generated reality, a universe of electrons controlled and manipulated
by those with the fastest cyberdecks and the hottest new code. In this world
is stored all of the information hidden behind powerful data fortresses just
waiting to be liberated by pirate computer users, deckers, who glide like
shadows through the corporate and governmental databases.
It is an era where information is power, where data and money are one and the
same. Multinational megacorporations have replaced governments as the true
superpowers. In a world where cities have grown together in sprawling
maga-plexes of concrete and steel, walled-off corporate enclaves and
arcologies are the modern castles from which corporate executives control
masses of wageslaves for the profit of a lucky and ruthless few.
But in the shadows of the corporate giants there are the SINless. Those
without System Identification Numbers are not recognized by the machinery of
society, by the bureaucracy so massive and complex that nobody understands it
completely. Among the SINless are the shadowrunners, traffickers in stolen
data and hot information, mercenaries of the street-discreet, effective, and
untraceable. They are the agents of the corporations that battle for power and
control in the concrete jungles.
In the depths of the Matrix, strange new forces stir, beyond the knowing of
any of the millions of people who access the vast network each day. The
dealings of a powerful inventor from a forgotten age of magic and a
multinational corporation with dreams of domination over the world market draw
the attention of powers unknown to either. A new faction has entered the
struggle of the Sixth World that is neither magic nor machine, but something