"Larry Niven & Steve Barnes - The California Voodoo Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

*1*тАФNew Dreams

Tuesday, July 19, 2059 - 5:00 P.M.

Late afternoon shadows crept across MIMIC.

Meacham Incorporated Mojave Industrial Community was one of the largest
structures in the world, for all of its ruined grandeur, a testament to 1990s
optimism and the vision of the late Nicholas Meacham. Built forty miles
northeast of Barstow, about twenty miles west of the California-Nevada
border, MIMIC looked east with a facade that resembled a nineteen-story
rust-colored sandwich board with a vertical convex crease. A thirty-foot-high
horizontal row of letters spelling M.I.M.I.C. divided the crease from the
tenth to the twelfth floor. The flattened top extended acres of concrete roof
onto Clark's Ridge, a natural mesa. At the bottom, MIMIC measured nearly
half a mile across.

According to documents found among Meacham's effects after his demise,
MIMIC was intended to be the "linchpin of a planned community, an
ever-expanding prefab metropolis poised to house and employ the excess
population which, in years to come, will boil out of the Los Angeles basin
like a crazed yeast culture."

As one might guess, Meacham's genius lay in construction, design, and
financing, rather than the realm of prose. If not for a little seismic
misunderstanding in 1995, MIMIC might have been all he anticipated.

After the Quake, MIMIC lay cracked and rotting for almost fifty years. Myths
about the abandoned hulk multiplied. There was a live nuclear reactor in its
guts; mutants prowled the ruins, shambling semi-human Morlocks with a
taste for trysting teenagers...

Then, abruptly, the nightmares were dispelled. Life began to return.

And with new life came new dreams.

The rooftop stretched to a convincingly distant horizon, a concrete flat
etched with pools and gardens, shadowed with California stucco. Newly
installed sensors scanned sun-bronzed tennis enthusiasts as they swished
their rackets about.
Monitors translated sounds of thudding feet and gasping lungs, waste-heat
silhouettes, and cheerfully exhausted visages into multisensory data for the
security banks. Like glowing ghosts, guests roamed through three
minimalls, lounged in tiny parks and arboretums, or chased golf balls
through the flames of purgatory and the gilded clouds of paradise in
Dante's, the best miniature golf course in the state.

A swimming pool glittered in the sun, like a pond touched by King Midas.
Here its border was a white sand beach; there a rippling frictionless slide