"Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling - Hormiga Canyon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

feelers for water. StefanтАЩs decaying cottage had leaky old plumbing. His
home was an ant oasis.

HeтАЩd never seen the ants in such numbers. Perhaps the frenzied
wireless signals from his massive mounds of cell phones had upset them
somehow? There were thousands of ants inside his TV, a dark stream of
them wending through the overheated circuit cards like the winding Los
Angeles River in its man-made canyons of graffiti-bombed cement. The
ants were eating the resin off the cards; they were gorging themselves on
his TVтАЩs guts like six-legged Cub Scouts eating molten sтАЩmores.

Stefan groaned and collapsed back into his overstuffed leather
armchair. The gorgeous TV was a write-off, but all was not yet lost. The
latest state of his system was still stored in his network of cell phones.

He reached for his sandwich, wincing at a stab of pain in his wrist.

The sandwich was boiling with ants. And then he felt insectile tickling
at his neck. He jumped to his feet, banged open the door of his leaky
bathroom, and hastily fetched up an abandoned comb. He managed to
tease three jolly ants from his strawy hair, which was dyed in a fading
splendor of day-glo orange and traffic-cone red.

Before heтАЩd moved into this old house, Stefan hadnтАЩt realized that
most everybody in L.A. had an ant story to tell. Stefan had the ants pretty
badly, but nobody sympathized with him. Whenever he reached out to
others with his private burden of tales, they would snidely one-up him with
amazing ant-gripes all their own: ants that ate dog food, ants that ate dogs,
ants that carried off children.

Compared to the heroic ant woes of other Angelenos, StefanтАЩs ant
problems seemed mild and low-key. His ants were waxy, rubbery-looking
little critters, conspicuously multi-ethnic in fine L.A. style, of every shape
and every shade of black, brown, red, and yellow. Stefan had them figured
for a multi-caste sugar-ant species. They emerged from the tiniest possible
cracks, and they adored sweet, sticky stuff.

Stefan bent over the rusty sink and splashed cold water on his
unshaven face. HeтАЩd done FX for fantasy movies that had won Oscars and
enchanted millions of people on six continents. But now, here he stood:
wrists wrecked, vermin-infested, no job, no girlfriend, neck-deep in code for
a ten-dimensional string-theory simulation with no commercial potential.

Kind of punk and cool, in a way. It sure beat commuting on the hellish
L.A. freeways. He was free of servitude. And he definitely had a strong
feeling that the very last tweak heтАЩd suggested for his Calabi-Yau search
program was the big winner.

Just three months ago, heтАЩd been ignoring his growing wrist pains
while writing commercial FX code for Square Root of Not. The outfit was a