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

NEAL STEPHENSON
69
"You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show
me samples of their work?"

"Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And
everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll-but his
code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of
seeing his output, all I saw was snow."
"Then why did he call the thing Snow Crash?"
"Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy."
"What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?"
"Some language I didn't recognize," Da5id says. "Just a bunch of
babble."
Babble. Babel.
"Afterward, you looked sort of stunned."
Da5id looks resentful. "I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole
experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second."
Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and
stands up. "Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?"
"What competitors?"
"You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?"
"Still do."
"Well, Sushi K is here tonight."
"Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy."
"You can see the rays from here," Da5id says, waving toward the next
quadrant, "but I want to see the whole getup."
It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the
Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a
fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the
crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the
whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of
Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width
regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the
orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.
"I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy
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SNOW CRASH
rap music from a Japanese person," Hiro says as they stroll over there.
"Maybe you should tell him," Da5id suggests, "charge him for the
service. He's in L.A. right now, you know."
"Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what a big
star he's going to be. He needs to be exposed to some actual biomass."
They inject themselves into a stream of traffic, winding a narrow
channel through a rift in the crowd.
"Biomass?" Da5id says.
"A body of living stuff. It's an ecology term. If you take an acre of
rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain
out all the nonliving stuff-dirt and water-you get the biomass."
Da5id, ever the bithead, says, "I do not understand." His voice sounds