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

it: homeowners, red.faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old
Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways
brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I
swear, can't you guys tell time?
Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed
industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to
learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from
Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about
pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem.
Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early
Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the
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SNOW CRASH
voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures
employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all
logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian
stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were
going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and
get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their
life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sent
psychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to
submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their
brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens
and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling,
mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that
even a Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a venial sin.
The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just
human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap
technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now,
corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling
the Deiverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away
since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas
rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each
pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into
place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the
Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from
his phone number and poured into the smart box's built-in RAM. From there it
is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on
a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield
so that the Deiverator does not even have to glance down.
If the thirty.minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed
to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo
himself-the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensorihurst, the
straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmares, the Capo
and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated__who will be on the
phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next
day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer's
NEAL STEPHENSON
yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free
trip to Italy-all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a