"Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

The damn bells kept ringing through the fog. Bud mumbled a
command to his music system, a phased acoustical array splayed
across both eardrums like the seeds on a strawberry. The volume
went up but couldnтАЩt scour away the deep tones of the carillon,
which resonated in his long bones. He wondered whether, as long as
he was at the mod parlor, he should have the batteries drilled out of
his right mastoid and replaced. Supposedly they were ten-year jobs,
but heтАЩd had them for six and he listened to music all the time, loud.
Three people were waiting. Bud took a seat and skimmed a
mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty,
wrinkled, blank sheet of paper. тАЬтАШAnnals of Self-Protection,тАЩтАЭ he
said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The
logo of his favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics,
mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid. Bud
scanned through them until he found the one that denoted a
comparison of a bunch of different stuff, and snapped at it with his
fingernail. New mediaglyphics appeared, surrounding larger cine
panes in which Annals staff tested several models of skull guns
against live and dead targets. Bud frisbeed the mediatron back onto
the table; this was the same review heтАЩd been poring over for the
last day, they hadnтАЩt updated it, his decision was still valid.
One of the guys ahead of him got a tattoo, which took about ten
seconds. The other guy just wanted his skull gun reloaded, which
didnтАЩt take much longer. The girl wanted a few тАШsites replaced in her
racting grid, mostly around her eyes, where she was starting to
wrinkle up. That took a while, so Bud picked up the mediatron
again and went in a ractive, his favorite, called Shut Up or Die!
The mod artist wanted to see BudтАЩs yuks before he installed the
gun, which in other surroundings might have been construed as an
insult but was standard business practice here in the Leased
Territories. When he was satisfied that this wasnтАЩt a stick-up, he
theezed BudтАЩs forehead with a spray gun, scalped back a flap of
skin, and pushed a machine, mounted on a delicate robot arm like a
dental tool, over BudтАЩs forehead. The arm homed in automatically
on the old gun, moving with alarming speed and determination.
Bud, who was a little jumpy at the best of times because of his
 3
muscle stimulators, flinched a little. But the robot arm was a
hundred times faster than he was and plucked out the old gun
unerringly. The proprietor was watching all of this on a screen and
had nothing to do except narrate: тАЬThe hole in your skullтАЩs kind of
rough, so the machine is reaming it out to a larger boreтАФokay, now
here comes the new gun.тАЭ
A nasty popping sensation radiated through BudтАЩs skull when
the robot arm snapped in the new model. It reminded Bud of the
days of his youth, when, from time to time, one of his playmates
would shoot him in the head with a BB gun. He instantly developed
a low headache.
тАЬItтАЩs loaded with a hundred rounds of popcorn,тАЭ the proprietor
said, тАЬso you can test out the yuvree. Soon as youтАЩre comfortable