"Clancy, Tom - Net Force 02 - Hidden Agendas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

mottled green color that apparently hadn't
overwhelmed any of his customers. Somebody might as
well get some use from it, he'd told her.
She smiled into the phone, a vox-only connection
with her mother. Mama had never cottoned to the idea of
picture phones. What if the phone rang before she
put her face on? her hair was messed up? If
she was in the shower?
"Mama, if you're so worried about how much these
calls are cos ting me, why don't you get an
ISDN or a DL and let Aldo hook
Papa's computer to it? For ten dollars a month,
we could talk over the net as much as we want."
"I don't wanna be foolin" with no computer
business," Mama said.
"It's too complicated."
"It's not any more complicated than using the
telephone.
All you have to do is turn it on and tell it my
number if you want to call. If I call you, you
just have to touch a button when it beeps, and you get
audio and video."
"It's too complicated."
Toni grinned again. Mama would never change.
There was a bare-bones computer in the ground-floor
brownstone apartments where Toni had grown up, a
birthday gift from Toni and the boys a couple of
years ago. Most American homes these days had
some kind of house computer, but Mama didn't want
anything to do with it. While she didn't cross herself
when she walked past it, Toni had long believed that
Mama looked at the thing as if it were the spawn of
Satan, just waiting to ensnare her in its tendrils and
drag her off to electronic Hades. Sophia
Banks Fiorella was sixty-five, and had six
children, five of them boys, all of them
college-educated. Aldo, at thirty-one, the
youngest child save for Toni, was a high level
programmer for the State of New York's
judicial system, and if he couldn't convince
Mama to use the computer after all the Sunday
dinners trying, Toni was wasting her time.
"So, whenna you comin' home?"
"Thursday night late," Toni said.
"They're giving us the 24th off, but I have to work
on the 23rd."
"You need Papa to pick you up at the
airport?"
"Papa is not supposed to be drivin'. Mama,
he can't see that good. I thought Larry was gonna