"Michael Marshall Smith - More Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

got a modem and a phone line, you can get on there too. I can tell you can hardly wait.
What you find when youтАЩre there almost qualifies as a parallel universe. There are thousands of pieces of
software, probably millions of text files. You can check the records of the New York Public Library, send a message to
someone in Japan which will arrive within minutes, download a picture of the far side of Jupiter, and monitor how many
cans of Dr Pepper there are in a particular soda machine in the computer science labs of American universities. A lot
of this stuff is fairly chaotically organised, but there are a few systems which span the net as a whole. One of these is
the newsgroups.
There are about 10,000 of these groups now, covering anything from computers to fine art, science fiction to
tastelessness, the books of Stephen King to quirky sexual preferences. If itтАЩs not outright illegal, out there on the
information superhighway people will be yakking about it twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Either that
or posting images: there are paintings and animals, NASA archives and abstract art, and in the
alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless group you can find anything from close-up shots of roadkills to people with acid burns
on their faces. Not very nice, but trust me, itтАЩs a minority interest.
Basically the groups are little discussion centres that stick to their own specific topic. People read each otherтАЩs
messages and reply, or forward their own pronouncements or questions. Some groups have computer files, like
software or pictures, others just have text messages. Now that I think of it, thereтАЩs some illegal stuff too (drugs,
mainly): thereтАЩs a system by which you can send untraceable and anonymous messages, though IтАЩve never bothered
to check it out.
No one, however sad, could hope to keep abreast of all of these groups, and nor would you want to. I personally
donтАЩt give a toss about recent developments in Multilevel Marketing Businesses or the Nature of Chinchilla Farming
in America Today, and have no interest in reading megabytes of mindless burblings about them. So I, like most
people, stick to a subset of the groups that carry stuff IтАЩm interested in тАУ Mac computers, guitar music, cats and the
like.
So now you know.

The following Tuesday I got up bright and early and made my way to the VCA for my first morningтАЩs work.
England was doing its best to be summery, which, as always, meant that it was humid without being hot, bright
without being sunny, and every third commuter on the hellish Underground was intermittently pebble-dashing nearby
passengers with hay-fever sneezes. I emerged moist and irritable from the Tube, more determined than ever to find a
way of working that meant never having to leave my flat. The walk from the station to the VCA was better, passing
through an attractive square and a selection of interesting sidestreets, and I was feeling chipper again by the time I got
there.
My suppliers had done their work, and the main area of the VCAтАЩs open-plan office was piled high with exciting
boxes. When I walked in, just about all the staff were standing round the pile, coffee mugs in hand, regarding it with a
wary enthusiasm as if they were simple country folk and it was a recently landed UFO. There was a slightly toe-curling
five minutes of introductions, embarrassing merely because I donтАЩt enjoy that kind of thing. Only one person, John,
seemed to view me with the sniffy disdain of someone greeting an underling whose services are, unfortunately, in the
ascendant. Everybody else seemed nice, some very much so.
Whitehead eventually oiled out of his office and dispensed a few weak jokes which had the тАУ possibly intentional
тАУ effect of scattering everyone back to their desks to get on with their work. I took off my jacket, rolled up my sleeves
and got on with it.
I spent the morning cabling like a wild thing, placing the hardware of the network itself. As this involved a certain
amount of disrupting everyone in turn by drilling, pulling up carpet and moving their desks, I was soon on apologetic
grinning terms with most of them. I guess I could have done the wire-up over the weekend when nobody was there,
but I like my weekends as they are. John gave me the invisibility routine that people once used on servants, but
everyone else was fairly cool about it. One of the girls, Jeanette, actually engaged me in conversation while I worked
nearby, and seemed genuinely interested in understanding what I was doing. When I broke it to her that it was
actually fairly dull, she smiled.
The wiring took a little longer than I was expecting, and I stayed on after everybody else had gone. Everyone but
Egerton, that was, who stayed, probably to make sure that I didnтАЩt run off with their spoons, or database, or plants.