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

flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of
proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society
of bit-heads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that
the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing
more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who
sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more
than that-the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on
his own for about three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one
or two things in the whole world-samurai movies and the Macintosh-and he
understood them far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for
someone like Juanita.
There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass
of every Army base in the world. In a long series of such places, Him
Protagonist was speed-raised like a mutant hothouse orchid flourishing under
the glow of a thousand Buy 'n' Fly security spotlights. Him's father had
joined the army in 1944, at the age of sixteen, and spent a year in the
Pacific, most of it as a prisoner of war. Hiro was born when his father was
in his late middle age. By that time, Dad could long since have quit and
taken his pension, but he wouldn't have known what to do with himself
outside of the service, and so he stayed in until they finally kicked him
out in the late eighties. By the time Him made it out to Berkeley, he had
lived in Wrightstown, New Jersey; Tacoma, Washington; Fayetteville, North
Carolina; Hinesville, Georgia; Killeen, Texas; Grafenwehr, Germany; Seoul,
Korea; Ogden, Kansas; and Watertown, New York. All of these places were
basically the same, with the same franchise ghettos, the same strip joints,
and even the same people-he kept running into school chums he'd known years
before, other Army brats who happened to wind up at the same base at the
same time.
54
SNOW CRASH
Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same
ethnic group: Military. Black kids didn't talk like black kids. Asian kids
didn't bust their asses to excel in school. White kids, by and large, didn't
have any problem getting along with the black and Asian kids. And girls knew
their place. They all had the same moms with the same generous buttocks in
stretchy slacks and the same frosted-and-curling-ironed hairdos, and they
were all basically sweet and endearing and conforming and, if they happened
to be smart, they went out of their way to hide it.
So the first time Hiro saw Juanita, or any other girl like her, his
perspectives were bent all out of shape. She had long, glossy black hair
that had never been subjected to any chemical process other than regular
shampooing. She didn't wear blue stuff on her eyelids. Her clothing was
dark, tailored, restrained. And she didn't take shit from anyone, not even
her professors, which seemed shrewish and threatening to him at the time.
When he saw her again after an absence of several years-a period spent
mostly in Japan, working among real grown-ups from a higher social class
than he was used to, people of substance who wore real clothes and did real
things with their lives- he was startled to realize that Juanita was an
elegant, stylish knockout. He thought at first that she had undergone some