"Neal Stephenson - Spew (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

along with pimples and (if I may just fill in the blanks) screwing skanky guys
who'll never have a salaried job. And I think she's cute and everything but it
occurs to me that this is really kind of sick - I mean, this chick has admitted
to a history of shedding blizzards every time she moved her head, and here she
is getting down under eight megawatts of color-corrected halogen light, and I
just know I'm supposed to be thinking about how much head chaff would be sifting
down in her personal space right now if she hadn't ditched her old hair care
product lineup in favor of -
Click. Course, it never really clicks anymore, no one has used mechanical
switches since like the '50s, but some Spew terminals emit a synthesized click -
they wired up a 1955 Sylvania in a digital sound lab somewhere and had some old
gomer in a tank-top stagger up to it and change back and forth between Channel 4
and Channel 5 a few times, paid him off and fired him, then compressed the sound
and inseminated it into the terminals' fundamental ROMs so that we'd get that
reassuring click when we jumped from one Feed to another. Which is what happens
now; except I haven't touched a remote, don't even have a remote, that being the
whole point of the Polysurf. Now it's some fucker picking a banjo, ouch it is an
actual Hee Haw rerun, digitally remastered, frozen in pure binary until the
collapse of the Universe.
Click. And I resist the impulse to say, "Wait a minute. Hee Haw is my favorite
show."
Well, I have lots of favorite shows. But me and my housemates, we're always
watching Hee Haw. But all I get is two or three twangs of the banjo and a
glimpse of the eerily friendly grin of the banjo picker and then click it's a
'77 Buick LeSabre smashing through a guardrail in SoCal and bursting into a
fireball before it has even touched the ground, which is one of my favorite
things about TV. Watch that for a while and just as I am settling into a nice
Spew daze, it's a rap video, white trailer park boys in Clackamas who've
actually got their moho on hydraulics so it can tilt and bounce in the air while
the homeboys are partying down inside. Even the rooftop sentinels are boogieing,
they have to boogie, using their AK-47s like jugglers' poles to keep their
balance. Under the TV lights, the chrome-plated bayonets spark like throwaway
cameras at the Orange Bowl Halftime Show.
And so it goes. Twenty clicks into the test I've left my fear behind, I'm
Polysurfing like some incarnate sofa god, my attention plays like a space laser
across the Spew's numberless Feeds, each Feed a torrent, all of them plexed
together across the panascopic bandwidth of the optical fiber as if the contents
of every Edge City in Greater America have been rammed into the maw of a giant
pasta machine and extruded as endless, countless strands of polychrome angel
hair. Within an hour or so I've settled into a pattern without even knowing it.
I'm surfing among 20 or so different Feeds. My subconscious mind is like a
retarded homunculus sacked out on the couch of my reptilian brain, his thumb
wandering crazily around the keypad of the world's largest remote control. It

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looks like chaos, even to me, but to the proctors, watching all my polygraph
traces superimposed on the video feed, tracking my blood pressure and pupil