"Нейл Стефенсон. Snow Crash (Снежная лавина, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

reach. Manager kicks a rusty coffee can across the floor, caroming it
expertly off her skin, so she can go to the bathroom.
"Where you from?" Y.T. asks.
"Tadzhikistan," he says.
A jeek. She should have known.
'Well, shitcan soccer must be your national pastime."
The manager doesn't get it. The MetaCops emit rote, shallow laughter.
Papers are signed. Everyone else goes upstairs. On his way out the
door, the manager turns off the lights; in Tadzhikistan, electricity is
quite the big deal.
YT. is in The Clink.




The Black Sun is as big as a couple of football fields laid side by
side. The decor consists of black, square tabletops hovering in the air (it
would be pointless to draw in legs), evenly spaced across the floor in a
grid. Like pixels. The only exception is in the middle, where the bar's four
quadrants come together (4 - 22). This part is occupied by a circular bar
sixteen meters across. Everything is matte black, which makes it a lot
easier for the computer system to draw things in on top of it-no worries
about filling in a
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complicated background. And that way all attention can be focused on
the avatars, which is the way people like it.
It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on the Street, where it's so
crowded and all the avatars merge and flow into one another. But The Black
Sun is a much classier piece of software. In The Black Sun, avatars are not
allowed to collide. Only so many people can be here at once, and they can't
walk through each other. Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. And
the clientele has alot more class-no talking penises in here. The avatars
look like real people. For the most part,.so do the daemons.
"Daemon" is an old piece of jargon from the UNIX operating system,
where it referred to a piece of low-level utility software, a fundamental
part of the operating system. In The Black Sun, a daemon is like an avatar,
but it does not representahuman being. It's a robot that lives in the
Metaverse. A piece of software, a kind of spirit that inhabits the machine,
usually with some particular role to carry out. The Black Sun has a number
of daemons that serve imaginary drinks to the patrons and run little errands
for people.
It even has bouncer daemons that get rid of undesirables- grab their
avatars and throw them out the door, applying certain basic principles of
avatar physics. Da5id has even enhanced the physics of The Black Sun to make
it a little cartoonish, so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit
over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before
they are ejected. This happens to people who are being disruptive, to anyone
who is pestering or taping a celebrity, and to anyone who seems contagious.
That is, if your personal computer is infected with viruses, and attempts to