"Cory_Doctorow_Liberation_Spectrum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doctorow Cory)

MacDiarmid stood fast.

"Get in the fucking chair, Mac," Lee-Daniel said, hating the whine in his voice. "If you want me to go along with this, get in the fucking chair.

"Mac, I'm sorry. Sorry if I flew off the handle. I'm a grown-up, you're a grown-up, and we both care about CogRad. Get in the chair and tell me about this. Please."

MacDiarmid sat.

"Listen up, LD. This is a great business, and a great company. Be proud, because you started something fantastic that will grow and grow.

"But I am saving your life. You're burned out. You're making bad decisions that threaten the lives of your people. You can't even let someone else take the wheel when you're nodding off. You can't keep this up forever. Rate you're going, you can't keep this up for another six weeks. If I thought for a second that you'd take orders from someone else, I'd offer to keep you on as COO or VP of Research and Development. There's no way, though -- you're like Napoleon on campaign.

"You're great at the dirty work. You can get a crew onto a rez, get the terminals sited and installed and burned in. You can boss a bunch of egomaniacs and social retards on long road trips. That does not scale, LD. There aren't enough Lee-Danielses to boss all the buses we're going to field. A real CEO doesn't make every single decision there is to make.

"You want it straight. You want it end-to-end. It's come down to your ego versus our return on investment, and your ego loses. We're settling into the next phase, going abroad, and that requires a professional touch. If Canada ends up in a firefight, what'll it be like in Guatemala?"

The Series A man snorted a nasty chuckle and Lee-Daniel gripped the arms of his chair as hard as he could to keep from slugging the punk. Lee-Daniel and his people work around a lot of surveying constraints. At the Moapa River Indian Reservation, the burial ground was freaking perfect for a repeater-array, with a commanding view of the entire goddamned rez. The Paiute elders loved the idea of getting out of the cutthroat slots biz, loved the idea of leveraging their airwaves into a telco that could handle the secure comms for every one of the casinos that they used to compete with.

The money couldn't come at the expense of the burial ground. No CogRad surveyor crew was going to head up there and start hammering in stakes for the repeaters.

The Akwesahsne Warriors took the cake. A fat, middle-aged man in camou fatigues decorated with pow-wow badges who called himself "Meatloaf" briefed them with a topo map of the rez in the school auditorium, and they sat around it in the fading light of the sun that streamed through the steel-reinforced windows.

"The areas that have Post-its are strategic. No one except a Warrior goes within 20 meters of these."

"Sixty feet," Lee-Daniel translated for the surveyors and the antennamen, who were products of the American educational system and hence impedance-mismatched with the entire metric-speaking world.

"Sixty feet," Meatloaf said. "You'll know you've gotten too close if you find yourself at the bottom of a ten-foot pit with two broken legs. Don't go near the strategic areas, OK?"

Elaine stood up and began to pace the map's length. She unsnapped a laserpointer from her gearpig bandolier and began to hit each strategic area in turn.

"All the high ground, right?"

Meatloaf nodded.

"The perimeter, too, right?"

He nodded again.

Elaine gave Lee-Daniel a look, then ran the dot of her pointer over each of the strategic areas again. Some of the surveyors groaned and whispered to the antennamen and the switchgirls.

Lee-Daniel cleared his throat. "Meatloaf," he said, "all respect, but well, this won't work. Our radios operate on line of sight. If we can see it, we can shoot it at half a gigabit a second -- slower if there are a lot of leaves and stuff in the way. If we can't see it, we can't shoot it. Zero bits per second. We need high ground, we need perimeter, otherwise we're just wasting your time."

Meatloaf shook his head. "Radio radiates. I can't see the cell tower, but I can still reach it with my phone."

"That's dumb radio," Lee-Daniel said. "If we want to have a conversation and we're out of sight of one another, we can communicate, but only if we shout. That's fine for us, but it's not so good for the people between us, right, Mortimer?"

Mortimer, who'd been through one or two (hundred) of these demos before, took his cue from outside the doorway, hitting it with the loudhailer dialed up about half way. "Right," he said.

"That's how dumb radio works. You had a bunch of bands that you could communicate in -- cellular, TV, AM, FM, cops, air traffic, whatever -- and rules and licenses for each, governing how loud everyone gets to shout." Taking their cues, the CogRads started to gabble all at once, in stripes through the ranked chairs, saying "AM AM AM" or "TV TV TV" or "cellular cellular cellular."