"Norman Spinrad - Journals of the Plague Years 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

Bit by bit, inch by inch, I drifted into the underground. You'd be
surprised how many black-carders there were surviving outside the Quarantine
Zones on phony IDs, a secret America within America, hiding within plain sight
of the SPs living by our wits and our own code.
We found one another by some kind of second sight impossible to explain.
Pally pushers. ID wizards. Hookers just like me.
And not like me.
There were bars where we met to trade in pallies and IDs and information.
You met all kinds. Pally dealers and drug dealers. ID wizards. Hookers like
me, male and female, selling interface sex to the solid citizens. And hookers
of the other kind.
Hookers selling meat.
It was amazing how many blue-carders were willing to risk death for the
real thing. It was amazing how innocent some of them were willing to be. At
first I refused to believe the stories the meatwhores told in the bars, cackling
evilly all the time. I refused to believe that they were knowingly spreading
the Plague and laughing about it. I refused to believe that blue-carders could
be so stupid.
But they were and they could. And after a while, I understood.
There were people who would pay fantastic prices for meatsex with another
certified blue-carder. There were clandestine meat-bars where they hung out,
bars with ID readers. Pick up one of these fools, pop your phony card in a
reader, and watch their eyes light up as the strip read out blue, no line to the
national data banks here, not with the SPs raiding any such bar they could get a
line on. And you got paid more for a quick meatfuck than you could earn in a
week of interface hooking.
Sure I was tempted. There was more to it than the money. Didn't I long
for meat myself? Wasn't that how I had Gotten It in the first place? Didn't
these damn blue-card assholes deserve what they got?
Who knows, I might have ended up doing it in the end if I hadn't met Saint
Max, Our Lady of the Flowers.
Saint Max was a black-carder. He carried his own ID reader around and he
didn't worry about phony cards reading out blue.
Saint Max would give meat only to certified black-carders, and he would
never refuse anyone, even the most rotted-out Terminals.
 I was in an underground bar in Santa Monica when Saint Max walked in, and
half-a-dozen people told me his story before I ever heard it from his lips.
Saint Max was a legend of the California underground. The only real hero we
had.
Max was a bisexual, male or female, it didn't matter to him, and he never
took money. People fed him, bought him drinks, gave him the latest pallies,
found him free flop, sent him on his way. "I am dependent on the kindness of
strangers," Max used to say. And in return, any black-carder stranger could
depend on kindness from him.
Max was old; in terms of how long he had survived with God knew how many
Plague strains inside him, he was ancient. He had lived in the San Francisco
Quarantine Zone before it was a Quarantine Zone. And he was a man with a
mission. He had this crazy theory.
I heard it from him that night after I had bought him a meal and about
half-a-dozen drinks.