"Pat Cadigan - Death in the Promised Land" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cadigan Pat)

"No, " agreed the woman, "because if you had, you'd know that netgaming isn't considered official net communication or transaction, so it's not governed by FCC or FDSA regulations. Get on, pick a name or buy a permanent label, stay as long as you like-or can afford-and log out when you've had enough. Netgaming is one hundred percent elective, so anything goes-no guidelines, no censorship, no crimes against persons. You can't file a complaint against anyone for assault, harassment, fraud, or anything like that."
Konstantin sighed. "I didn't know this. Why not?"
"You didn't have to." Howard Ruth laughed. "Look, officer-"
"Lieutenant. "
"Sure, lieutenant. Unless you netgame regular, you won't know any of this. You ever hear about the case years back where a guy used an origin line to track down a woman in realtime and kill her?"
"No," said Konstantin with some alarm. "Where did this happen?"
"Oh, back east somewhere. D.C., I think, or some place like that. Life is so cheap there, you know. Anyway, what happened was, back when they had origin lines in gaming, this guy got mad at this woman, somehow found

her by way of her origin line, and boom-lights out. That was one of the first cases of that gameplayer's madness where someone could prove it could be a real danger offline. After that, there was a court ruling that since gaming was strictly recreational, gamers were entitled to complete privacy if they wanted. No origin line. Kinda the same thing for fraud and advertising."

Konstantin felt her interest, which had started to wane with the utterance D.C., come alive again. "What?"
"Guy ran a game-within-a-game on someone. I can't remember exactly what it was-beachfront in Kansas, diamond mines in Peru, hot stocks about to blow. Anyhow, the party of the second part got the idea it was all backed up in realtime and did this financial transfer to the party of the first part, who promptly logged out and went south. Party of the second part hollers Thief! and what do you know but the police catch this salesperson of the year. Who then claims that it was all a game and he thought the money was just a gift.
"And?" said Konstantin.
"And that's a wrap. Grand jury won't even indict, on grounds of extreme gullibility. As in, 'You were in artificial reality, you fool, what did you expect? Personally, I think they were both suffering from a touch of the galloping headbugs. "
Konstantin was troubled. "And that decision stood?"
"It's artificial reality-you can't lie, no matter what you say. It's all makebelieve, let's-pretend, the play's the thing." Howard Ruth laughed heartily. "You choose to pay somebody out here for time in there, that's your hotspot. Life is so strange, eh?"
Konstantin made a mental note to check for court rulings on AR as she pressed for a clean page in the archiver. "But if being in an AR makes people insane . . . "
"Doesn't make everyone insane," the woman said. "That's what it is, you know. The honey factory don't close down just because you're allergic to bee stings."
Konstantin was still troubled. "So when did those things happen?" she asked, holding the stylus ready.
"I don't know," Howard Ruth said, surprised at the question. "Oughta be in the police files, though. Doesn't law enforcement have some kind of central-national-international bank you all access? Something like Police Blotter?"
"In spite of the name," Konstantin said, speaking slowly so the woman couldn't possibly misunderstand, "Police Blotter is actually a commercial net-magazine, and not affiliated with law enforcement in any official way. But yes, we do have our own national information center. But I need to know some kind of key fact that the search program can use to hunt down the information I want-a name, a date, a location." She paused to see if any of this was forthcoming. The other woman only shrugged.
"Well, sorry I can't be of more help, but that's all I know." She got up and stretched, pressing her hands into the small of her back. "If anyone knows more, it's Body Sativa."

"Body Sativa," said the first customer interviewee. He was an aging child with green hair and claimed his name was Earl O'Jelly. "Nobody knows more. Nobody and no body. If you get what I mean."
Konstantin didn't bury her face in her hands. The aging child volunteered the information that he had been in the crowd by the Hudson that Shantih Love had staggered through, but claimed he hadn't seen anything like what she described to him.

Neither had the next one, a grandmother whose AR alter-ego was a twelveyear-old boy-assassin named Nick the Schick. "That means I technically have to have 'the' as my middle name, but there's worse, and stupider as well," she told Konstantin genially. "Nick knows Body, of course. Everybody knows Body. And vice versa, probably. Actually, I think Body Sativa's just a database that got crossed with a traffic-switcher and jumped the rails."

"Pardon?" Konstantin said, not comprehending.
The grandmother was patient. "You know how files get cross-monkeyed? Just the thing-traffic-switcher was referencing the database in a thunderstorm, maybe sunspots, and they got sort of arc-welded. Traffic-switcher interface mutated from acquired characteristics from all the database entries. That's what I say, and nobody's proved yet that that couldn't happen. Or didn't. " She nodded solemnly.
Konstantin opened her mouth to tell the woman that if she understood her correctly, what she was describing was akin to putting a dirty shirt and a pile of straw in a wooden box for spontaneous generation of mice and then decided against it. For one thing, she wasn't sure that she had understood correctly and for another, the shirt-and-straw method of creating mice was probably routine in AR.

There was no third interviewee. Instead, an ACLU lawyer came in and explained that since the crime had occurred in the real world, and all the so called witnesses had been in AR, they weren't actually witnesses at all, and could not be detained any longer. However, all of their names would be available on the video parlor's customer list, which Konstantin could see as soon as she produced the proper court order.
"In the meantime, everyone agrees you ought to talk to this Body Sativa, whatever she is," the lawyer said, consulting a palmtop. "Assuming she'll give you so much as the time of day without legal representation. "
"I suppose I need a court order for that, too," Konstantin grumbled.

"Not hardly. AR is open to anyone who wants to access it. Even you, Officer Konstantin. " The lawyer grinned, showing diamond teeth. "Just remember the rules of admissibility. Everything everyone tells you in AR- "
--is a lie, right. I got the short course tonight already. " Konstantin's gaze strayed to the monitor, now blank. "I think I'll track this Body Sativa down in person and question her in realtime. "
"Only if she voluntarily tells you who she is out here," the lawyer reminded her a bit smugly. "Otherwise, her privacy is protected."
"Maybe she'll turn out to be a good citizen," Konstantin mused. "Maybe she'll care that some seventeen-year-old kid got his throat cut."
The lawyer's smug expression became a sad smile. "Maybe. I care. You care. But there's no law that says anyone else has to."
"I know, and I'd be afraid if there was. Even so-" Konstantin frowned. "I do wish I didn't have to depend so much on volunteers."

She sent DiPietro and Celestine over to the dead kid's apartment building, though she wasn't expecting much. If he was typical, his neighbors would have barely been aware of him. Most likely; they would find he had been yet another gypsy worker of standard modest skills, taking temporary assignments via a city-run agency to support his various habits. Including his AR habit.
Just to be thorough, she waited in Guilfoyle Pleshette's office for the call letting her know that the other two detectives had found a generic one-room apartment with little in the way of furnishings or other belongings to distinguish it from any other generic one-room apartment in the city. Except for the carefully organized card library of past AR experiences in the dustless, static-free, moisture- and fire-proof non-magnetic light-shielded container. Every heavy AR user kept a library, so that no treasured moment could be lost to time.

The library would go to headquarters to be stored for the required ten-day waiting period while a caseworker tried to track down next-of-kin. If none turned up, the card library would then be accessed by an automated program designed to analyze the sequences recorded on each card and construct a profile of the person, which would then be added to the online obituaries. Usually this would cause someone who had known the deceased to come forward; other times, it simply confirmed that there was no one to care.

The idea came unbidden to Konstantin, derailing the semidoze she had slipped into at whatever indecent A.M. the night had become. She plugged the archiver into the phone and sent the retriever to fetch data on the other seven AR DOAs.
Delivery was all but immediate-at this time of night, there wasn't much data traffic. Konstantin felt mildly annoyed that DiPietro and Celestine couldn't report in just as quickly. Perhaps they had taken the stringer with them and were even now playing to the cam in an inspection of the dead kid's apartment.