"Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doctorow Cory)

personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at non-zero,
the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people, even with the
migratory and deadhead drains on the population. “You’ve been jaunting?”
I asked—his eyes were too sharp for him to have missed an instant’s
experience to deadheading.
He chuckled. “No sir, not me. I’m into the kind of macho shitheadery
that you only come across on-world. Jaunting’s for play; I need work. ” The
bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.
I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had to
resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. I
tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes and then their
involuntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery, gave it up and let a
prideful grin show.
“I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful. ”
He must’ve seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history. “Wait,
don’t go doing that—I’ll tell you about it, you really got to know.
“Damn, you know, it’s so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks.
You’d think you’d really miss ’em, but you don’t.”
And it clicked for me. He was a missionary—one of those fringedwellers
who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted
corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve,
and choke on petrochem waste. It’s amazing that these communities survive
more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive
our detractors. The missionaries don’t have such a high success rate—you
have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that’s already
successfully resisted nearly a century’s worth of propaganda—but when
you convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give.
More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed from a backup after they
aren’t heard from for a decade or so. I’d never met one in the flesh before.
“How many successful missions have you had?” I asked.
“Figured it out, huh? I’ve just come off my fifth in twenty
years—counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain
NORAD site, still there a generation later. ” He sandpapered his whiskers
with his fingertips. “Their parents went to ground after their life’s savings
vanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle.
Plenty of those, though.”
He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance of
the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in subtle,
beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses, then a

Cory Doctorow Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 5
gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowly inching them
toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn’t remember why they hadn’t
wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they were mostly off-world,
exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and unlimited supplies and
deadheading through the dull times en route.
“I guess it’d be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. They
think of us as the enemy, you know—they had all kinds of plans drawn up
for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth,
booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They just