"Neal Stephenson - The Great Simoleon Caper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

The Great Simoleon Caper
by Neal Stephenson
Hard to imagine a less attractive life-style for a young man just out of college than going back to
Bismarck to live with his parents - unless it's living with his brother in the suburbs of Chicago,
which, naturally, is what I did. Mom at least bakes a mean cherry pie. Joe, on the other hand, got me
into a permanent emotional headlock and found some way, every day, to give me psychic noogies.
For example, there was the day he gave me the job of figuring out how many jelly beans it would
take to fill up Soldier Field.

Let us stipulate that it's all my fault; Joe would want me to be clear on that point. Just as he was
always good with people, I was always good with numbers. As Joe tells me at least once a week, I
should have studied engineering. Drifted between majors instead, ended up with a major in math and
a minor in art - just about the worst thing you can put on a job app.

Joe, on the other hand, went into the ad game. When the Internet and optical fiber and HDTV and
digital cash all came together and turned into what we now call the Metaverse, most of the big ad
agencies got hammered - because in the Metaverse, you can actually whip out a gun and blow the
Energizer Bunny's head off, and a lot of people did. Joe borrowed 10,000 bucks from Mom and Dad
and started this clever young ad agency. If you've spent any time crawling the Metaverse, you've seen
his work - and it's seen you, and talked to you, and followed you around.

Mom and Dad stayed in their same little house in Bismarck, North Dakota. None of their neighbors
guessed that if they cashed in their stock in Joe's agency, they'd be worth about $20 million. I nagged
them to diversify their portfolio - you know, buy a bushel basket of Krugerrands and bury them in the
backyard, or maybe put a few million into a mutual fund. But Mom and Dad felt this would be a
no-confidence vote in Joe. "It'd be," Dad said, "like showing up for your kid's piano recital with a
Walkman."

Joe comes home one January evening with a magnum of champagne. After giving me the obligatory
hazing about whether I'm old enough to drink, he pours me a glass. He's already banished his two
sons to the Home Theater. They have cranked up the set-top box they got for Christmas. Patch this
baby into your HDTV, and you can cruise the Metaverse, wander the Web and choose from among
several user-friendly operating systems, each one rife with automatic help systems, customer-service
hot lines and intelligent agents. The theater's subwoofer causes our silverware to buzz around like
sheet-metal hockey players, and amplified explosions knock swirling nebulas of tiny bubbles loose
from the insides of our champagne glasses. Those low frequencies must penetrate the young brain
somehow, coming in under kids' media-hip radar and injecting the edfotainucational muchomedia
bitstream direct into their cerebral cortices.

"Hauled down a mother of an account today," Joe explains. "We hype cars. We hype computers. We
hype athletic shoes. But as of three hours ago, we are hyping a currency."

"What?" says his wife Anne.

"Y'know, like dollars or yen. Except this is a new currency."

"From which country?" I ask. This is like offering lox to a dog: I've given Joe the chance to enlighten
his feckless bro. He hammers back half a flute of Dom Perignon and shifts into full-on Pitch Mode.
"Forget about countries," he says. "We're talking Simoleons - the smart, hip new currency of the
Metaverse."