"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Then out on the streets.
As they ran, Frank said, “Have you had that thing for long?”
“Too long, my friend.” Edgardo veered side to side as he ran, warming up his ankles
in his usual extravagant manner. “But I haven’t had to get it out for a while.”
“Don’t you worry that having it there looks odd?”
“No one notices things in the locker room.”
“Are our offices bugged?”
“Yes. Yours, anyway. The thing you need to learn is that coverage is very spotty,
just by the nature of the activity. The various agencies that do this have different
interests and abilities, and very few even attempt total surveillance. And then only for
crucial cases. Most of the rest is what you might call statistical in nature, and covers
different parts of the datasphere. You can slip in and out of such surveillance.”
“But—these so-called total information awareness systems, what about them?”
“It depends. Mostly by total information they mean electronic data. And then also
you might be chipped in various ways, which would give your GPS location, and
perhaps record what you say. Followed, filmed—sure, all that’s possible, but it’s
expensive. But now we’re clear. So tell me what’s up?”
“Well—like I said. About the election results, and that program I gave you. From my
friend. What happened?”
Edgardo grinned under his mustache. “We foxed that program. We forestalled it.
You could say that we un-stole the vote in Oregon, right in the middle of the theft.”
“We did?”
“Apparently so. The program was a stochastic tilt engine that had been installed in
some of Oregon and Washington’s voting machines. My friends figured that out and
managed to write a disabler, and to get it introduced at the very last minute, so there
wasn’t any time for the people who had installed the tilter to react to the change.
From the sound of it, a very neat operation.”
Frank ran along feeling a glow spread through him as he tried to comprehend it. Not
only the election, de-rigged and made honest—not only Phil Chase elected by a
cleaned-up popular and electoral vote—but his Caroline had proved true. She had
risked herself and come through for the country; for the world, really. And so—
Maybe she would come through for him too.
This train of thought led him through the glow to a new little flood of fear for her.
Edgardo saw at least some of this on his face, apparently, for he said, “So your
friend is the real thing, eh?”
“Yes.”
“It could get tricky for her now,” Edgardo suggested. “If the tweakers try to find the
leakers. As we used to say at DARPA.”
“Yeah,” Frank said, his pulse rate rising at the thought.
“You’ve sent a warning?”
“I would if I could.”
“Ah!” Edgardo was nodding. “Gone away, has she?”
“Yes,” Frank said; and then it was all pouring out of him, the whole story of how
they had met and what had followed. This was something he had never managed to
do with anyone, not even Rudra or Anna, and now it felt as if some kind of
hydrostatic pressure had built up inside him, his silence like a dam that had now
failed and let forth a flood.
It took a few miles to tell. The meeting in the stuck elevator, the unsuccessful hunt
for her, the sighting of her on the Potomac during the flood, the brief phone call with
her—her subsequent call—their meetings, their—affair.