"Travis S. Taylor - The Quantum Connection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor Travis S)

My freshman year I got a cooperative education job working for a local company that made wireless
data routers and switching hubs. I learned a lot about hardware, encryption, and code writing to drive
hardware back then. Then the Framework opened up and not long after that The Realm was invented.
Right off the bat I found a small Node and uploaded some tidbits that earned me a little extra cash to help
pay for my apartment, food, and beer, and when I didn't earn enough from my job, The Realm, and my
scholarship, I just took out a student loan. Oh, did I forget to explain that the harder to find a Node is,
the more bandwidth you are allowed to upload with? You can use a Node as often as you like once you
know how to find and access it, but it costs about fifteen bucks per second to upload data. I think this
was RealmSoft's way of encouraging code writers to write efficient code and to spend hours in there
looking for bigger Nodes. It's a great racket. A monthly subscription to The Realm costs about fifty
bucks for forty hours, or seventy-five for unlimited access.
What about viruses? There is rumored to be a World where all the viruses get stored and mutated,
but it makes no sense to me why they would keep them. My guess is they use some sort of anti-virus
Agent to take care of the problem.
So, anyway, I had tried to Sequence a few times since The Rain, but knowing I would never see
anyone I cared about took the real life out of me, and knowing that I would never get the chance to play
ZZ again just took the wind from my virtual sails. On the other hand, I did need money to live on, since I
dropped out of school, or I should say "took a break," lest the student loan collectors come calling, and
the money I make at the video game rental and repair store that I work at now just doesn't pay the bills.
My thinking was that if I spent all my time trying to reverse engineer ZZ's Hole, I could input it into The
Realm through the secret Node I found on Planet Xios and win a few Sequences with it. Then I could sell
it for big bucks to the other Sequencers. My EnergyBeingSM09 was bringing me about twenty-three
thousand dollars a year (after taxes) on royalties, so I figured ZZ's Hole would make much more than
that. Then, I could quit that damn video store.

I was having no luck at all with it. Two years passed, and I still was getting nowhere. I replayed the
recording of the video Sequence over and over and over to no avail. I tried testing in my own Test Realm
the mini black hole codes I developed but test pilot Sequencer StM987 had failed and StM988 was
about to give it a try, if I could figure out why StM987 didn't work that is. That JackieZZ, whoever she
was, must've been a coding genius. Either that or she had some insight from her father at RealmSoft
Europe. Make a short story long; I was having no luck and it was time to go to work.
"Lazarus, buddy," I stroked his chin. "I gotta go pay the bills," I told him. He had grown into quite the
companion. As a bonus, I didn't have to vacuum anymoreтАФsince Lazarus was a vacuum himself. If it
could be swallowed, he would eat it. I tossed him a smelly doggy bacon treat and made my way out the
door.
The weather was a bit crummy, even for summer in Dayton. The sky was hazy and grayer than blue
and the sun was very red, not yellowish orange like it used to be, and it was only about ninety degrees
and muggy as hell. We were supposed to have bad storms later, the kind that used to only occur in
tornado alley; now they happened everywhere. The word inside The Realm was that the dust and excess
thermal energy that was thrown into the atmosphere from The Rain was the culprit. Makes sense to me,
but I'm no atmospheric scientist.
Just as I pulled into the parking lot of VR's V.R. World it started raining, hard. "Good thing I didn't
bring an umbrella. Shit!" I told my 2011 Cutlass, which in just two weeks would have its tenth birthday.
The Cutlass didn't seem to care, although it choked and tried not to cease combustion when I turned off
the ignition switch. I rushed to the door of VR's, getting soaked from head to toe since rushing isn't really
my forte.
"You're right on time, Mr. Montana! Good for you," the eighteen-year-old blue-haired punk who
was my boss pointed out as he looked up from the television. He had threatened to fire me if I was late
one more time, but it was just a hollow threat, since he knew that nobody could repair the game systems
or draw the Sequencers into the shop like me. Besides he seemed enthralled by what was on the flat