"Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

Hiro walks around the table to look. He gets a brief glimpse of the scroll before the Brandy snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light, like a flexible, flat-screened television set, and it's not showing anything at all. Just static. White noise. Snow.
Then she's gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant.
Da5id's back to normal, wearing a grin that's part snide and part embarrassed.
"What was it?" Hiro says. "I just glimpsed some snow at the very end."
"You saw the whole thing," Daid says. "A fixed pattern of black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand ones and zeroes for me to look at."
"So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to what, maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information," Hiro says.
"Noise, is more like it."
"Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code," Hiro says.
"Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I'm not a computer. I can t read a bitmap."
"Relax, Da5id, I'm just shifting you," Hiro says.
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"You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show me samples of their work?"

"Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll-but his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of seeing his output, all I saw was snow."
"Then why did he call the thing Snow Crash?"
"Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy."
"What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?"
"Some language I didn't recognize," Da5id says. "Just a bunch of babble."
Babble. Babel.
"Afterward, you looked sort of stunned."
Da5id looks resentful. "I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second."
Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and stands up. "Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?"
"What competitors?"
"You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?"
"Still do."
"Well, Sushi K is here tonight."
"Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy."
"You can see the rays from here," Da5id says, waving toward the next quadrant, "but I want to see the whole getup."
It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.
"I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy
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rap music from a Japanese person," Hiro says as they stroll over there.
"Maybe you should tell him," Da5id suggests, "charge him for the service. He's in L.A. right now, you know."
"Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what a big star he's going to be. He needs to be exposed to some actual biomass."
They inject themselves into a stream of traffic, winding a narrow channel through a rift in the crowd.
"Biomass?" Da5id says.
"A body of living stuff. It's an ecology term. If you take an acre of rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain out all the nonliving stuff-dirt and water-you get the biomass."
Da5id, ever the bithead, says, "I do not understand." His voice sounds funny; there's a lot of white noise creeping into his audio.
"Industry expression," Hiro says. "The Industry feeds off the human biomass of America. Like a whale straining krill from the sea."
Him wedges himself between a couple of Nipponese businessmen. One is wearing uniform blue, but the other is a neotraditional, wearing a dark kimono. And, like Hiro, he's wearing two swords-the long katana on his left hip and the one-handed wakizashi stuck diagonally in his waistband. He and Hiro glance cursorily at each other's armaments. Then Hiro looks away and pretends not to notice, while the neo-traditional is freezing solid, except for the corners of his mouth, which are curling downward. Him has seen this kind of thing before. He knows he's about to get into a fight.
People are moving out of the way; something big and inexDrable is plunging through the crowd, shoving avatars this way rnd that. Only one thing has the ability to shove people around like that inside The Black Sun, and that's a bouncer daemon.
As they get closer, Hiro sees that it's a whole flying wedge of Lhem, gorillas in tuxedos. Real gorillas. And they seem to be headed toward Hiro.
He tries to back away, but he quickly runs into something. Looks like Bigboard finally got him in trouble; he's on his way out ,f the bar.
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"Da5id," Him says. "Call them off, man, I'll stop using it"
All of the people in his vicinity are staring over Him's shoulder, their faces illuminated by a stew of brilliant colored lights.
Hiro turns around to look at Da5id. But Da5id's not there anymore.
Instead of Da5id, there is just a jittering cloud of bad digital karma. It's so bright and fast and meaningless that it hurts to look at. It flashes back and forth from color to black and white, and when it's in color, it rolls wildly around the color wheel as though being strafed with high-powered disco lights. And it's not staying within its own body space; hair-thin pixel lines keep shooting off to one side, passing all the way across The Black Sun and out through the wall. It is not so much an organized body as it is a centrifugal cloud of lines and polygons whose center cannot hold, throwing bright bits of body shrapnel all over the room, interfering with people's avatars, flickering and disappearing.