"Garbage Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

Market Street Station, jabbering, punching one another, giggling. Freedom was
theirs at last, and the news of their escape could not have traveled any faster
than the boys themselves. It would be a while before anyone came looking.
A billboard of animated wellstone proudly announced the station as one of only
five public fax depots in the downtown area. A little map showed their
locations, scattered across a kidney-shaped district a couple of kilometers
across, and the flanking text informed the boys that ownership and operation of
private fax gates within the exclusion zone was sharply restricted. Depending on
the boys' exact destination, their transportation options from here included bus
(free), automotive taxi ($), horse-drawn ("hansome") cab ($$), and of course
walking, which according to the sign was strongly encouraged in a commercial
preservation zone of Denver's caliber.
"Ooh," one of the boys said, pretending to be impressed, and of course
emphasizing the remark with the raised, limp hands of some supposed effete
aristocracy. It was Yinebeb Fecre who did this, with an additional layer of
irony he probably wasn't aware of: by the standards of Camp Friendly, he was an
effete aristocrat, the hyperactive child of two well-known television critics.
Feck the fairy.
"Shut up," Bascal told him mildly. "Denver's raw. It's good."
Conrad hadn't seen the place except on TV, but overall he was inclined to agree.
Back in his parents' day, fax technology had hit urban areas like a saturation
bombing campaign, rewriting their maps and landscapes overnight. Many cities
became beehives of addressable spaces whose physical locations were all but
irrelevant. Streets vanished; sidewalks vanished; neighborhoods vanished. In
some cases the cities themselves vanished, or became hypothetical entities with
outposts scattered all over the solar system. But Denver's urban planners had
seen it coming, had drawn this cordon around the heart of the city to preserve
it from the tyrannies of convenience. Not just a Children's City, this, but a
Federal Historic District and member of the Living Museum Network.
The terminal itself was underground, a dimly-lit urban space filled with columns
and information kiosks and snack bars, and old-fashioned telephones that were
probably just for show. Another billboard Ч this one illuminated with tiny red
dots Ч announced periods of planned outage in the fax gates here, and periods of
broadband connection to some specific destination for some specific window of
time: HONOLULU 21:15-21:17 TODAY. There were ranks of embossed numbers along the
ceiling, although what purpose they served was not apparent.
Some people carried luggage Ч an eccentricity in a world where fax machines
could store any object in callable library routines and print copies on demand.
There were other eccentricities apparent in the crowd: people who looked older
or younger than the "ageless" standard of Queendom beauty. People who were
dressed funny, people who had funny hair. And children of various ages, of
course Ч comprising nearly ten percent of this crowd of dozens. The mix was
interesting and cosmopolitan and yeah, highly raw. Fresh, original. Whatever.
But everyone in the crowd Ч even the children Ч seemed to greet the arrival of
fourteen unescorted, dirty-faced adolescents as a sign of trouble. A mother
snatched up the hand of a toddler and pulled him close. Others were less overt,
but their suspicion was lightly veiled at best.
Welcome to Denver. Keep your hands where we can see them.
Conrad gave back some dirty looks. It wasn't like people got away with crimes
anymore; not when the whole Earth was one giant sensor. Even where events