"Richard Laymon - Dreambox Junkies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)

with so many other criterial elements, she cited Janko Brauch as her template. Janko's neck had been
gorg. How old, she wondered, would Janko Brauch have been now, had he lived? Mid-forties? Still a
rock god, a viable shigshag?

Sesha winced at her crassness. Poor Janko. The manner of his death had never failed to bring a
shudder. Murdered at a gig by a fan of fifteen, a warped little girl with a bowie knife.

A couple of months ago she'd seen a synthesp Janko тАШactingтАЩ in a Wuthering Heights remake. It may
have looked just like Janko, with the voice and all the cool moves present and correct, but a
computer-assisted guess as to the performance Janko might have given was no real reincarnation of
Janko Brauch. They were enormously talented, these Hollywood pixelpuppeteers, but you could always
tell a synthesp from a real, live, breathing actor. Always. If you couldn't, you were a stupe. And in any
case, the whole idea was gross. She wouldn't normally be caught watching synthpics. She had only
looked at that one out of morbid curiosity.

Sipping transorganic red grape juice, Sesha had a quick glance through her idiopape. The big stark
headline sent a shiver through her.

'SICK NICK STRIKES AGAIN'

This time Sick Nick had infiltrated the latest in the interminable series of Simon Bermuda spy flicks and,
after raping and maiming the suave secret agent, had spent the remainder of the film subjecting the female
lead to a particularly unspeakable variety of sexual torture which, mercifullyтАФannoyinglyтАФthe тАШpape
didn't detail. (Sesha could have got more inf, but she disowned that dark little part of herself.)

As always, when hearing or reading about Sick Nick, Sesha felt nauseated and repelled. And yet, every
time she saw a film she found herself half-dreading but half-hoping for Sick Nick to outwit the shitfilters
and gatecrash the story and get to work, carving up the characters. (With the exception of anything
starring Janko Brauch. She couldn't bear the thought of Sick Nick attacking poor Janko, even his
inadequate synthesp.)

Naturally, Hollywood was in two minds about the Sick Nick problem. On the one hand, directors were
up in arms about having their work intruded upon, vandalized by this malicious cyberspook, and, as
secure quantencryption was still some way off, had begun to insist on a return to the pre-digital age, to
shooting films on celluloid and sending them out in cans, and fruck economics. On the other hand, though,
boxoffice takings were no longer in so steep a decline. And it was the same with NeTV: viewing figures
had held steady now for months. Inevitably, it was widely suspected that the whole thing was a desperate
corporate ploy to woo back punters from their Dreamboxes. Not just Sick Nick, but also all those other
schoolboy-prank pirate programs, like the roving erotoroutines that hypersexualized every image in their
path.

Sesha instructed her mobe to delete Sick Nick from her newstopic pool. Grow up, girl. Okay, so Sick
Nick's villainies were only ever virtual, illusory; what the cyberspook perpetrated wasn't real violence,
but his acts were still emblematic of actual incidents, of genuine crimes committed every day by some
sicko or other somewhere out there in the world. All those awful true-life horrors her mobe filtered out
when compiling her тАШpape. She had no appetite for anything too harrowing; why be harrowed? Who
wanted to be told and told again that you were living on the thin skin of a big balloon that was being
blown up and blown up and stretched beyond its limits, and sooner or later it just had to burst? She had
no time, by and large, for the non-personally-applicable; life was just too frucking short, and News
Credibility Analyzer chips were still nowhere near good enough.