"Back Door Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)
By Paul J. McAuley
УBack Door ManФ appeared originally in a British anthology of very limited circulation. WeТre delighted now to bring this story of the far future to you.
* * * *
CRANE WAS HARROWING Hell when the call came. It was Dante AlighieriТs default version, nine circles leading clown to the pit where Satan sat like the bullТs-eye of a target, immense, shaggily black, bat-winged and triple faced. Crane was in Lower Hell, the fourth round of the ninth circle, where traitors were buried up to their necks in ice. Virtual reality garners traversing this last circle of Hell were finding themselves suddenly dumped out of the link; a code conflict caused their moderns to reset. Crane had come in through one of the back doors left by the virtualityТs designers so that they could freely access any part of the code. He had sent a dumb aspect plodding across the icy plain, noted when it lost the link, then dropped in himself to triangulate the bad code and fix a patch.
Crane was tidying up when one of the devils he had co-opted to help him morphed into his agent, jeeves. A tall, imperturbable man with a round scrubbed face and shiny slicked back hair, dressed as ever in frock coat and pinstripe trousers, a dicky bow and starched white shirt.
УA call for you, sir,Ф jeeves said. УFrom a favored client.Ф
Crane sighed. Favored meant either rich, or well connected, or both. It meant aggravation and impossible demands. He said, УPort me there. IТm about done here, anyway.Ф
The agent coughed into his white-gloved hand. Like all of his kind, he had only four fingers. He said, УYouТll have to go there in person, IТm afraid, sir. And IТm afraid that you must leave at once. It is flagged at the highest level of urgency.Ф
Crane was about to ask where the client was when jeeves morphed back to the red-skinned devil. It yawned hugely, showing altogether too many rows of teeth, and belched a ball of oily fire. Droplets of flame etched fuming letters in the ice at CraneТs feet, spelling out a street address. The devil winked and scratched behind a pointed ear with the barb of its tail. Crane got going.
CRANE WAS a lineman. He fixed connections. Not in the physical net of microwave transmissions and diamond wire lines, but in the software that linked virtualities to the Internet and to each other, in the place where phones and TVs and computers promiscuously crossbred. He worked in the space where conversations happened. Between people, between machines Ч the distinction was irrelevant. In the ancient days of mechanical exchanges it had been a linear space the diameter of a single copper wire. Now it was a complex matrix, a constantly rewoven loom of light and electromagnetic waves too complex for human minds to understand. Barring natural disasters, most outages were due to software rather than hardware problems. The event that marked the complete reliance of communications technology on its software was generally held to be the 1990 crash of AT&TТs long-distance telephone switching system, caused by a bug in brand new software that had sent switching stations into fault-recovery mode in a spreading wave of knock-downs that had rapidly crippled the network.
A typical switching station of the time had had six hundred thousand lines, controlled by Signal Transfer Point software with ten million lines of code.
Things had become a lot more complicated since then.
Crane was an ex-hacker all of twenty-two years old. He had been recruited three years ago, after serving two months of community service for diverting lines and processing power in a private branch-exchange of a City of London brokerage firm to a bridge virtuality where his fellow hackers could hang out. He had readily gone over to the other side after he learnt that one of the other hackers had grassed him to the Net Cops. The hours were irregular, but it was intellectually challenging work and it paid well, and Crane didnТt have what you could call a social life. He was between girlfriends, was what he said if anyone asked. He didnТt say that heТd been between girlfriends for more than a year now.
The taxiТs adscreen lit as soon as Crane climbed in, and his dreamgirl was there, lithe and tanned in a skimpy halter and gold lame shorts cut high to show off her long legs, a bell of blonde hair framing her oval face, her green eyes meltingly beseeching. Knowing that she was a heuristic construct, refined by feedback through measuring his pupillary dilation, did not make the longing less.
Crane had stopped using virtual sex parlors a few months ago, had decided he would try celibacy for a while. Celibacy was currently hip, and it might be a useful conversational gambit if he ever again got the opportunity to try and chat up a girl. But celibacy was a difficult state of mind to achieve when every adscreen might light up with your ideal girl, beckoning, beseeching, pleading. Crane could understand why many people purchased interactive versions of their dreamgirls and dreamboys. Right now his own dreamgirl was trying to sell him a restructure of his finances; with an effort, he tuned her out.
The streets were almost deserted. The taxi drove at exactly the speed limit, weaving between a few delivery trucks and the occasional private car. People didnТt go out much. They could work and learn and shop from home, visit any place in the world that was wired for interactivity, spend hours gardening their own little plots of virtuality, visit friends, play games or lose themselves in sagas. More and more, people lived in fake environments generated by computers rather than in the disappointingly real world.
Crane hadnТt been out of his flat for over three weeks. He had been very busy. There had been a surge in connectivity problems lately. HeТd talked about it with other linemen. It looked like the net that bound the electronic universe together was undergoing another episode of emergent problems generated by its evergrowing complexity.
He was surprised that it was winter now. Rain pounding the wet road. Trees stripped bare. The gray sky sagging between rooftops. Smashed shop windows along Kingsland Road like empty tombs. Security cameras everywhere, on brackets on the comers of buildings, on top of street lamps and traffic lights. Nothing went unnoticed in the real world, just as in its electronic counterpart.
A bored policeman was on duty at the checkpoint at the northern entrance to the City of London. His dayglo orange slicker was beaded with rain. He spent a long time checking the taxi driverТs license on his slate, long enough for the ad site across the road to recognize Crane. And there was his dreamgirl again, laughing and looking back over her shoulder as, in a skimpy black bikini, she ran down a curve of white sand with palms on one side and blue water on the other, and on the adscreen in the taxi she whispered about the romance of tropical places, downloadable in a wide range of formats from a thousand local nodes. The definition of her image had noticeably improved Ч here in the financial center, the rate of information transfer was more than thirty times faster than elsewhere. Crane could see every golden hair of the peach fuzz over his dreamgirlТs creamy skin.
The policeman glanced at the ad and winked at Crane, who groaned and switched on his slate for distraction. No wonder so few chose to go out; there was no defense from the barrage of ads in public places.
Crane was still reading background on his client when the taxi pulled up.
A white building cantilevered above the ThamesТs brown swell like a gullТs wing, the lights of Tower Bridge in the background. Crane was met in the stark lobby by the clientТs secretary, a trim, small-boned man in a charcoal gray suit and discreet makeup, like a manicured weasel in a suit that probably cost more than CraneТs monthly salary. He gave Crane a look of distaste, as if he had just stepped on something nasty. Crane grinned back. He like upsetting suits with his obvious youth, his shaven skull with scalplock (currently dyed silver) and barcode tattoo, his black leather jacket, black T-shirt with silver skull logo, baggy green jeans, construction boots. He shook hands with the man; their personal area networks interfaced and swapped data through electrical fields generated in their bodies by a nanoampere current from the transmitters in their bracelets.
The secretaryТs look of distaste deepened when CraneТs identification was confirmed, but he ushered Crane between saw-leaved yuccas growing in white gravel banks into a little elevator that swiftly and silently took them up to the clientТs suite at the top of the building.
The view was tremendous, a plate glass window that took in a two hundred and forty degree panorama of the river and the South Bank, the great buildings lined up along the river like black glass dinosaurs come to the shore to drink. The room was large, uncluttered, streamlined. Because in virtuality anyone could live in Versailles or Xanadu (Kubla KhanТs or Orson WellsТs versions optional), the rich preferred simple but expensive decor in the real world. The white carpet was Iraqi lambswool; the desk a slab of buried walnut. Spotlights picked out a Chagall (Crane recognized the trademark flying cow), a Graham Sutherland goatТs head. An ancient Chinese screen half hid the doctor and her technicians who were attending the figure prone on the black leather couch.
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