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

After the breakup, Hiro went out with a long succession of essentially
bimbos who (unlike Juanita) were impressed that he worked for a high-tech
Silicon Valley firm. More recently, he has had to go searching for women who
are even easier to impress.
Juanita went celibate for a while and then started going out with Da5id
and eventually got married to him. Da5id had no doubts whatsoever about his
standing in the world. His folks were Russian Jews from Brooklyn and had
lived in the same brownstone for seventy years after coming from a village
in Latvia where they had lived for five hundred years; with a Torah on his
lap, he could trace his bloodlines all the way back to Adam and Eve. He was
an only child who had always been first in his class in everything, and when
he got his master's in computer science from Stanford, he went out and
started his own company with about as much fuss as Hiro's dad used to
exhibit in renting out a new P.O. box when they moved. Then he got rich, and
now he runs The Black Sun. Da5id has always been certain of everything.
Even when he's totally wrong. Which is why Hiro quit his job at Black
Sun Systems, despite the promise of future riches, and why Juanita divorced
Da5id two years after she married him.
Hiro did not attend Juanita and Da5id's weddin he was languishing in
jail, into which he had been thrown a few hours before the rehearsal. He had
been found in Golden Gate Park,
58
SNOW CRASH
lovesick, wearing nothing but a thong, taking long pulls from a jumbo
bottle of Courvoisier and practicing kendo attacks with a genuine samurai
sword, floating across the grass on powerfully muscled thighs to slice other
picnickers' hurtling Frisbees and baseballs in twain. Catching a long fly
ball with the edge of your blade, neatly halving it like a grapefruit, is
not an insignificant feat. The only drawback is that the owners of the
baseball may misinterpret your intentions and summon the police.
He got out of it by paying for all the baseballs and Frisbees, but
since that episode, he has never even bothered to ask Juanita whether or not
she thinks he's an asshole. Even Hiro knows the answer now.
Since then, they've gone very different ways. In the early years of The
Black Suri~project, the only way the hackers ever got paid was by issuing
stock to themselves. Hiro tended to sell his off almost as quickly as he got
it. Juanita didn't. Now she's rich, and he isn't. It would be easy to say
that Hiro is a stupid investor and Juanita a smart one, but the facts are a
little more complicated than that: Juanita put her eggs in one basket,
keeping all her money in Black Sun stock, as it turns out, she made a lot of
money that way, but she could have gone broke, too. And Him didn't have a
lot of choice in some ways. When his father got sick, the Army and the V.A.
took care of most of his medical bills, but they ran into a lot of expenses
anyway, and Him's mother-who could barely speak English-wasn't equipped to
make or handle money on her own. When Hiro's father died, he cashed in all
of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea. She loves it
there. Goes golfing every day. He could have kept his money in The Black Sun
and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went public, but his
mother would have been a street person. So when his mother visits him in the
Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro views that as his