"Tom Easton - Silicon Karma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

"Of course. Though I couldn't move fast enough to B-cup you." Ada
gestured toward a wall covered with bookcases that were already fading
to a poster whose flashing neon letters said:

VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE MAURITS FINNEGAN FOR MAYOR VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE Every
few seconds, the words in the center of the poster were replaced by a
squarish face, its eyes crinkled to suggest that Finnegan could see
further and clearer than his rivals. Albert shook his head. "That's an
old one," he said. The poster was surrounded by a stolid brick wall
topped with ornamental ironwork. Below it was a concrete sidewalk as
smooth and unblemished as the day it was made, a gutter that contained
no trace of litter or dead leaves, and a cobbled street. The view panned
to show a cityscape, tall buildings of glass and gleaming metal, their
lines suggesting those of integrated circuit chips. There was no other
hint of what underlaid the perceptions that were all the reality the
residents of the virtual world--or any other--could know. The viewpoint
returned to the street just in time to catch Albert walking past the
poster. He was a tall man with a firm gait that belied the evidence of a
small paunch. His curly hair was dark, almost black, and he wore a
zippered shirt of checkered flannel. A crack appeared between two
cobblestones in the street behind him. It widened, and a small figure
clad in skin-tight black stepped silently onto the surface. In its hands
was a revolver nearly as long as it was tall. The Albert in the image on
the wall was oblivious to what was behind him. The one in the padded
office chair groaned as the pop-up spread its legs, braced its elbows
against its ribs, and leveled its gun at Albert's back. Its face was
twisted with the effort needed, but the gun's barrel never wavered, and
when the pop-up pulled the trigger, Albert went down as if he were a
doll a child had dropped. "Boom," said Albert. His tone was resigned. He
was only software, and so were both gun and bullet. Yet their effect was
real enough. Software could destroy software, he had learned long ago,
when he was meat. Viruses were one example, though they did their damage
by reproducing and preempting memory and storage space. At least they
could be stopped, unlike the more malicious data bombs, which sought out
and overwrote particular segments of memory or data in a computer file.
That was, in effect, just what the bullet did to him. Boom, and the
program which, while it ran within the computer, created him, maintained
him, was him, crashed. He had first run into data bombs when several
marketing firms had complained that their databases were crashing; the
cause had turned out to be a small program which would seek out and
remove a user's name and phone number from every database it could
access via the Internet; it had been very popular among people who did
not wish to be bothered by telemarketers and junk mailers. The solution
had been to isolate the databases from the Internet. And now he was the
victim, and isolation was not possible because both he and his killer
were residents of the system. He had been killed twice since the first
time he had accepted an assignment from the computer. "Third time. I'm
dead."

"But not for long, and not for good. That wasn't ten minutes ago. I