"Paul J. McAuley - Back Door Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

PAUL J. MCAULEY

BACK DOOR MAN

"Back Door Man" appeared originally in a British anthology of very limited
circulation. We're delighted now to bring this story of the far future to you.

CRANE WAS HARROWING Hell when the call came. It was Dante Alighieri's default
version, nine circles leading clown to the pit where Satan sat like the
bull's-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 virtuality's 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.

"A call for you, sir," jeeves said. "From a favored client."

Crane sighed. Favored meant either rich, or well connected, or both. It meant
aggravation and impossible demands. He said, "Port me there. I'm about done
here, anyway."

The agent coughed into his white-gloved hand. Like all of his kind, he had only
four fingers. He said, "You'll have to go there in person, I'm afraid, sir. And
I'm afraid that you must leave at once. It is flagged at the highest level of
urgency."

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 Crane's 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 -- 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