"Rudy Rucker & Marc Laidlaw - The Perfect Wave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

THE PERFECT WAVE
by Rudy Rucker & Marc Laidlaw

Rudy Rucker, author, mathematician, and computer-science professor
extraordinaire, also edits and publishes an online SF ‘zine called Flurb
(www.flurb.net), where Marc Laidlaw is a regular contributor. Rudy is
currently working on a cyberpunk trilogy in which nanotechnology augments
human mental powers but threatens to destroy Earth. The first volume,
Postsingular, appeared from Tor this fall and is also available for free
download at (www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular). You can stay abreast of
the author’s multifarious activities via his illustrated blog,
(www.rudyrucker.com/blog).

Marc Laidlaw, the author of Dad’s Nuke and The 37th Mandala, has, for
the last ten years, worked in the videogame industry as lead writer for the
popular Half-Life series. He won the 2005 Game Developers’ Choice
Award for Best Writing for Half-Life 2.

****

It’s a pleasant June evening in the funky California beach town of Surf
City. Shadows lengthen across the state university campus, nestled amid
redwoods and pastures above the town; on the bay, wetsuited surfers bob
and slide on the tubes off Parker Point, their waves gilded by the setting
sun.

The Boardwalk amusement park’s chains of lights are coming on;
squeals burst irregularly from the roller coaster. Low cars creep down the
beachfront avenue, pumping beat-heavy music. Couples and families stroll
about; kids play in the yards of the grimy pastel homes in the side streets
off the Boardwalk; skaters grind and flip along railings, stoops and curbs.
Borne upon the cool evening breeze, the smells of grease and oregano
waft from a waterside warehouse restaurant.

The establishment’s marquee displays a long-snouted grinning
cartoon rat holding a surfboard and an oversized slice of pizza, the slice
flopping down to drip a cheese-strand onto the rat’s gnarly bare toes. The
rat wears a top hat and a long red T-shirt labeled C.R. The marquee sign
reads:

Cheezemore Ratt’s Surf Shack

Pizza, Games, and Family Fun!
 Yes, We Have “The Perfect Wave”(R)TM

A tall, skinny young man with a shock of straight platinum blond hair is
spraypainting a mural onto a concrete block wall facing the mostly empty
parking lot, the mural potentially visible to the cars trolling the beachfront
avenue. The painter is Zep: avid surfer, amateur scientist, temporarily
unhoused. His recently acquired companion Kaya sits on the ground,