"Alastair Reynolds - Signal to Noise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

affluent and well-fed than the average mule. Afterward, they went to look at
the Roman ruins, where Rachel Liversedge was busy talking to a group of
bored primary school children from the valleys.
 Mick enjoyed the boat ride more than the trip to the castle. There
were still enough nervelinked tourists on the boat for him not to feel
completely out of place, and being out in the bay offered some respite
from the cloying heat of the city center. Mick had even felt the breeze on
the back of his hand, evidence that the nervelink was really bedding in.

It was Andrea who nudged the conversation toward the reason for
Mick’s presence. She’d just returned from the counter with two paper cups
brimming with murky coffee, nearly spilling them as the boat swayed
unexpectedly. She sat down on the boat’s hard wooden bench.

“I forgot to ask how it went in the lab this morning?” she asked
brightly. “Everything working out okay?”

“Very well,” Mick said. “Joe says we were getting two megs this
morning. That’s as good as he was hoping for.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me. I know it’s to do with the amount of
data you’re able to send through the link, but I don’t know how it compares
with what we’d be using for a typical tourist setup.”

Mick remembered what Joe had told him. “It’s not as good. Tourists
can use as much bandwidth as they can afford. But Joe’s correlators never
get above five megabytes per second. That’s at the start of the twelve-day
window, too. It only gets worse by day five or six.”

“Is two enough?”

“It’s what Joe’s got to work with.” Mick reached up and tapped the
glasses. “It shouldn’t be enough for full color vision at normal resolution,
according to Joe. But there’s an awful lot of clever software in the lab to
take care of that. It’s constantly guessing, filling in gaps.”

“How does it look?”

“Like I’m looking at the world through a pair of sunglasses.” He pulled
them off his nose and tilted them toward Andrea. “Except it’s the glasses
that are actually doing the seeing, not my—his—eyes. Most of the time, it’s
good enough that I don’t notice anything weird. If I wiggle my head around
fast—or if something streaks past too quickly—then the glasses have
trouble keeping up with the changing view.” He jammed the glasses back
on, just in time for a seagull to flash past only a few meters from the boat.
He had a momentary sense of the seagull breaking up into blocky areas of
confused pixels, as if it had been painted by a cubist, before the glasses
smoothed things over and normality ensued.

“What about all the rest of it? Hearing, touch…”