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

the trideo. The world where everything makes sense and I know who I am and
what my purpose is.
I'm so tired, so very tired. I have to rest, just for a little while, close my
eyes for a second and rest...
5

The megacorporations, beyond the reach of any national or international law,
are capable of dictating terms to any government in the world, so tight is
their hold on the world's economy. However, the same economic system also
binds the megacorporations as surely as it does any of their customers.
Corporations exist solely to generate profit, so they depend on the ability to
continually gain market share and produce new products to sell to their
customers and to draw in new customers.
This ongoing competition between nation-spanning giants might well have
degenerated into open warfare among the megacorporations without having to
resort to the needless destruction of company assets. The Corporate Court is
the invisible force operating behind the scenes of the megacorporations to
maintain the delicate balance between them; keeping the most powerful forces
on Earth from each other's throats and so keeping the unsuspecting citizens of
the world safe from what could escalate into the most devastating war humanity
has ever known.
-Professor Henry Gallow, The Invisible Hand:
The Corporate Court and World Economics,
MIT&T Press, Boston, 2052
The Corporate Court was called into session shortly after Lynn Osborne's visit
to her Fuchi colleague, once all of their fellow justices had arrived on the
orbital. Osborne showed up early and watched the other justices slowly file

into the central area of the station to take up their positions in the
courtroom. The Rotunda, as the central core of the orbital was called, was
made up of a single hexagonal shaft to which the other station tubes and
modules connected like branches spreading out from the trunk of a great tree.
It was large by the cramped standards of a space station, capable of holding
the gathered justices and their trusted aides and assistants comfortably,
although it was rare for all thirteen members of the Corporate Court to gather
together in the same room. Like David Hague, most of the justices preferred to
conduct their business via the Matrix, only visiting the court chambers of the
Zurich-Orbital on the gravest occasions requiring utmost security. Like now.
It was difficult to create a dignified courtroom atmosphere in the
zero-gravity of the orbital, but the Court had done its best to see that
tradition and the decorum were upheld. A narrow ledge ringed the cylindrical
chamber. Between the ledge and the wall was a gap wide enough for the court
justices to position themselves, held in padded harnesses to the wall. The
ledge formed the "bench" from which they dispensed justice. It held
sophisticated computer displays and information-retrieval systems linked
directly into the Zurich-Orbital mainframe, one of the most sophisticated
computer systems ever designed. Designed by Renraku, in fact, Osborne recalled
with a bit of a chill as she ran a finger over the flat black macroplast
surface of her console. Renraku's specialty was computer architecture and,
although Fuchi, Mitsuhama, Ares, and others had provided much of the hardware