"Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Japanese happytalk news. Alex, born in 20 10, had watched the news
grow steadily more
and cheerful for all of his twenty-one years. As a m~ he'd witnessed
hundreds of hours of raw
footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, unsanitary wreckage,
all against a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelenting
environmental decline. All that stuff was still out there, just as
every aspect of modern reality had its mirrored shadow in the Net
somewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to find it, and the
people discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of budgets.
Somewhere along the line, the entire global village had slipped into
neurotic denial.
Today, as an adult, Alex found the glass pipelines of the Net
chockablock with jet-set glamour weddings and cute dog stories. Perky
heroines and square-jawed heroes were still, somehow, getting rich
quick. Starlets won lotteries and lottery winners became starlets.
Little children, with their heads sealed in virtuality helmets, mimed
delighted surprise as they waved their tiny gloved hands at enormous
hallucinations. Alex had never been that big a fan of current events
anyway, but he had now come to feel that the world's cheerful shiny-
toothed bullshitters were the primal source of all true evil.
Alex collided and stuck in a Mexican docudrama about UFOs; they were
known as los OVNIS in Spanish, and on 9 de mayo, 2031, a large
fraction of the Latin American populace seemed afflicted with
spectacular attacks of ozmimania. Long minutes of Alex's life seeped
idly away as the screen pumped images at him: monster fireballs by
night, puffball-headed dwarfs in jumpsuits of silver lame, and a
video prophecy from some interstellar Virgen de Guadalupe with her
owll Internet address and a toll-free phone number.
The day nurse tapped at the door and bustled in. The day nurse was
named Concepcibn. She was a hefty, nononsense, fortyish individual
with a taste for liposuction, face-lifts, and breast augmentation.
"~Ya le hicieron Ia prueba de Ia sattgre?" she said.
Alex turned off the television. "The blood test? Yeah, I had one this
morning."
"~Le duele todcwia el ped.~o como anoche?"
"Pretty bad last night," Alex admitted. "Lots better, though, since I
started using the mask."
"Un catarro atroz, complicado con una alergia," Concepci├│n
sympathized.
"No problem with pain, at least," Alex said. "I'm getting the best of
treatment."
Concepci├┤n sighed and gestured him up. "Todavi~ no acabamos,
muchacho, le falta la enema de los pulmones."
"A lung enema?" Alex said, puzzled.

"Today? Right now? ~Ahora?"
She nodded.
"Do I have to?"
Concepci├┤n looked stern. "jEl doctor Mirabi Ia recetd! Fue muy claro.