"Нейл Стефенсон. The Big U (Большое "U", англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автораhave to empty out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what
they did to Paul Bennett, because they knew he was just screwed up enough to frag the System for revenge." "So much for his career, then." "No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for four times his old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten good work out of him and thought they were safe from reprisals. About a week later, though, the Worm showed up." "And that is-- ?" "Paul Bennett's sabotage program. He put it into the computer before he was fired, you see, and activated it, but every morning when he came to work he entered a secret command that would put it on hold for another twenty-four hours. As soon as he stopped giving the command, the Worm came out of hiding and began to play hell with things." "But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired," "Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC staff and hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan. But when you make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the temptation to see it work is just overwhelming. He must have been dying to see the Worm in action. So the Worm. That was in the middle of last year. At first it did minor things such as erasing student programs, shutting the System down at odd times, et cetera. Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the Operator-- the master program that controls the entire System-- and wreak vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center personnel fought it for a while, but they were successful for only so long. The Operator is a huge program and you have to know it all at once in order to understand what the Worm is doing to it." "Aha," I said, beginning to understand, "they needed someone with a photographic memory. They needed another prodigy, didn't they? So they got you? Is that it?" At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person they needed," he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me." "Really? You're a free lance?" "I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services. You needn't know the details." I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me enough so that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was very abstract work, consisting mostly of reading long strings of numbers off the terminal and |
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