"Нейл Стефенсон. The Big U (Большое "U", англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

have 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
when he was fired, he decided, what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash
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