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

typing new ones in. On the night I sat in, the Worm had eaten all of the
alumni records for people living in states beginning with "M." ("M!," said
Virgil, "the worst letter it could have picked.") Virgil was puttering around
in various files to see if the information had been stored elsewhere. He found
about half of Montana hidden between lines of an illegal video game program,
retrieved the data, erased the illegal program and caused the salvaged
information to be printed out on a string of payroll check forms in a machine
in the administrative bloc.

On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not nobly saving
erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was actually arranging his
living situation for the coming year. He had about five choice rooms around
the Plex, which he filled with imaginary students in order to keep them
vacant-- an easy matter on the computer. To support his marijuana and ale
habits he extracted a high salary from various sources, sending himself
paychecks when necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt,
because Fred Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work
in the Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop.
To support himself he took money from research accounts in proportion to
the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An indispensable place
like the Science Shop needed a strong leader, someone bold enough to levy
appropriate taxes against its users and spend the revenues toward the ends
those users desired. Virgil had figured out how to do it, and made himself a
niche at the Big U more comfortable than anyone else's.

Sarah lived in a double room just five floors above me and Ephraim Klein
and John Wesley Fenrick, on E12S-- E Tower, twelfth floor, south wing. The
previous year she had luxuriated in a single, and resolved never to share her
private space again; this double made her very angry. In the end, though, she
lucked out. Her would-be roommate had only taken the space as a front, to fake
out her pay-rents, and was actually living in A Tower with her boyfriend. Thus
Sarah did not have to live four feet away from some bopper who would suffer an
emotional crisis every week and explore the standard uses of sex and drugs and
rock-and-roll in noisy experimental binges on the other side of the room.

Sarah's problem now was to redecorate what looked like the inside of a water
closet. The cinderblock walls were painted chocolate brown and absorbed most
light, shedding only the garish parts of the spectrum. The shattered tile
floor was gray and felt sticky no matter how hard she scrubbed. On each side
of the perfectly symmetrical room, long fluorescent light fixtures were bolted
to the walls over the beds, making a harsh light nearby but elsewhere only
a dull greenish glow. After some hasty and low-budget efforts at making it
decent, Sarah threw herself into other activities and resigned herself to
another year of ugliness.

On Wednesday of the term's second week there was a wing meeting. American
Megaversity's recruitment propaganda tried to make it look as though the
wings did everything as a jolly group, but this had not been true on any of
Sarah's previous wings. This place was different. When she had dragged her
duffel bags through the stairwell door on that first afternoon, a trio of