"Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling - Junk DNA" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

JUNK DNA
by RUDY RUCKER and BRUCE STERLING


First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, January 2003.



Life was hard in old Silicon Valley. Little Janna Gutierrez was a native Valley girl, half Vietnamese, half
Latino. She had thoughtful eyes and black hair in high ponytails.
Her mother Shirley tried without success to sell California real estate. Her father Ruben plugged away
inside cold, giant companies like Ctenephore and Lockheed Biological. The family lived in a charmless
bungalow in the endless grid of San Jose.
Janna first learned true bitterness when her parents broke up. Tired of her hard scrabble with a lowly
wetware engineer, Shirley ran off with Bang Nguyen, the glamorous owner of an online offshore casino.
Dad should have worked hard to win back Mom's lost affection, but, being an engineer, he contented
himself with ruining Bang. He found and exploited every unpatched hole in Bang's operating system. Bang
never knew what hit him.
Despite Janna's pleas to come home, Mom stubbornly stuck by her online entrepreneur. She bolstered
Bang's broken income by retailing network porn. Jaded Americans considered porn to be the
commonest and most boring thing on the Internet. Hollywood glamour, however, still had a moldy cachet
in the innocent Third World. Mom spent her workdays dubbing the ethnic characteristics of tribal
Somalis and Baluchis onto porn stars. She found the work far more rewarding than real estate.
Mom's deviant behavior struck a damp and morbid echo in Janna's troubled soul. Janna sidestepped
her anxieties by obsessively collecting Goob dolls. Designed by glittery-eyed comix freaks from Hong
Kong and Tokyo, Goobs were wiggly, squeezable, pettable creatures made of trademarked Ctenephore
piezoplastic. These avatars of ultra-cuteness sold off wire racks world-wide, to a generation starved for
Nature. Thanks to environmental decline, kids of Janna's age had never seen authentic wildlife. So they
flipped for the Goob menagerie: marmosets with butterfly wings, starfish that scuttled like earwigs, long,
furry frankfurter cat-snakes.
Sometimes Janna broke her Goob toys from their mint-in-the-box condition, and dared to play with
them. But she quickly learned to absorb her parents' cultural values, and to live for business buzz. Janna
spent her off-school hours on the Net, pumping-and-dumping collectible Goobs to younger kids in other
states.
Eventually, life in the Valley proved too much for Bang Nguyen. He pulled up the stakes in his
solar-powered RV and drove away, to pursue a more lucrative career, retailing networked toilets.
Janna's luckless Mom, her life reduced to ashes, scraped out a bare living marketing mailing lists to
mailing list marketers.
Janna ground her way through school and made it into U.C. Berkeley. She majored in computational
genomics. Janna worked hard on software for hardwiring wetware, but her career timing was off. The
latest pulse of biotech start-ups had already come and gone. Janna was reduced to a bottle-scrubbing
job at Triple Helix, yet another subdivision of the giant Ctenephore conglomerate.
On the social front, Janna still lacked a boyfriend. She'd studied so hard she'd been all but dateless
through school and college. In her senior year she'd moved in with this cute Korean boy who was in a
band. But then his mother had come to town with, unbelievably, a blushing North Korean bride for him in
tow. So much the obvious advice-column weepie!
In her glum and lonely evenings, Janna played you-are-her interactives, romance stories, with a climax
where she would lip-synch a triumphant, tear-jerking video. On other nights Janna would toy wistfully
with her decaying Goob collection. The youth market for the dolls had evaporated with the years. Now
fanatical adult collectors were trading the Goobs, stiff and dusty artifacts of their lost consumer