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

spread them via The Black Sun, you had better keep one eye on the ceiling.
Hiro mumbles the word "Bigboard." This is the name of a piece of
software he wrote, a power tool for a CIC stringer. It digs into The Black
Sun's operating system, rifles it for information, and then throws up a flat
square map in front of his face, giving him a quick overview of who's here
and whom they're talking to. It's all unauthorized data that Hiro is not
supposed to have. But Hiro is not some bimbo actor coming here to network.
He is a hacker. If he wants some information, he steals it right out of the
guts of the system-gossip cx machina.
52
SNOW CRASH
Bigboard shows him that Da5id is ensconced in h~s usual place, a table
in the Hacker Quadrant near the bar. The Movie Star Quadrant has the usual
scattering of Sovereigns and wannabes. The Rock Star Quadrant is very busy
tonight; Hiro can see that a Nipponese rap star named Sushi K has stopped in
for a visit. And there are a lot of record-industry types hanging around in
the Nipponese Quadrant-which looks like the other quadrants except that it's
quieter, the tables are closer to the floor, and it's full of bowing and
fluttering geisha daemons. Many of these people probably belong to Sushi K's
retinue of managers, flacks, and lawyers.
Hiro cuts across the Hacker Quadrant, headed for Da5id's table. He
recognizes many of the people in here, but as usual, he's surprised and
disturbed by the number he doesn't recognize-all those sharp, perceptive
twenty-one-year-old faces. Software development, like professional sports,
has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
Looking up the aisle toward Da5id's table, he sees Da5id talking to a
black-and-white person. Despite her lack of color and shitty resolution,
Hiro recognizes her by the way she folds her arms when she's talking, the
way she tosses her hair when she's listening to Da5id. Hiro's avatar stops
moving and stares at her, adopting just the same facial expression with
which he used to stare at this woman years ago. In Reality, he reaches out
with one hand, picks up his beer, takes a pull on the bottle, and lets it
roll around in his mouth, a bundle of waves clashing inside a small space.


___________ Her name is Juanita Marquez. Hiro has known her ever since
they were freshmen together at Berkeley, and they were in the same lab
section in a freshman physics class. The first time he saw her, he formed an
impression that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish,
geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant
at a funeral parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that
she would turn on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose,
earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of
the other freshmen had even perceived.
NEAL STEPHENSON
It wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up
working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the
equation together. At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was
working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department,
because nobody thought that faces were all that important-they were just