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

"Yeah. Co for it. It's not every day you get to try out a new drug,"
Hiro says.
"Well, you can try one every day if you want to," Da5id says, "but it's
not every day you find one that can't hurt you." He picks up the hypercard
and tears it in half.
For a second, nothing happens. "I'm waiting," Da5id says. An avatar
materializes on the table in front of Da5id, starting out ghostly and
transparent, gradually becoming solid and three-dimensional. It's a really
trite effect, Him and Da5id are already laughing,
The avatar is a stark naked Brandy. It doesn't even look like the
standard Brandy; this looks like one of the cheap Taiwanese Brandy
knockoffs. Clearly, it's just a daemon. She is holding a pair of tubes in
her hands, about the size of paper.towel rolls.
68
SNOW CRASH
Da5id is leaning back in his chair, enjoying this. There is some. thing
hilariously tawdry about the entire scene.
The Brandy leans forward, beckoning Da5id toward her. Da5id leans into
her face, grinning broadly. She puts her crude, ruby-red lips up by his ear
and mumbles something that Hiro can't hear.
When she leans back away from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks
dazed and expressionless. Maybe Da5id really looks that way; maybe Snow
Crash has messed up his avatar somehow so that it's no longer tracking
Da5id's true facial expressions. But he's staring straight ahead, eyes
frozen in their sockets.
The Brandy holds the pair of tubes up in front of Da5id's immobilized
face and spreads them apart. It's actually a scroll. She's unrolling it
right in front of Da5id's face, spreading it apart like a flat
two-dimensional screen in front of his eyes. Da5id's paralyzed face has
taken on a bluish tinge as it reflects light coming out of the scroll.
Hiro walks around the table to look. He gets a brief glimpse of the
scroll before the Brandy snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light,
like a flexible, flat-screened television set, and it's not showing anything
at all. Just static. White noise. Snow.
Then she's gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause
sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant.
Da5id's back to normal, wearing a grin that's part snide and part
embarrassed.
"What was it?" Hiro says. "I just glimpsed some snow at the very end."
"You saw the whole thing," Daid says. "A fixed pattern of
black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand
ones and zeroes for me to look at."
"So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to what,
maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information," Hiro says.
"Noise, is more like it."
"Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code," Hiro
says.
"Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I'm not a
computer. I can t read a bitmap."
"Relax, Da5id, I'm just shifting you," Hiro says.