"Rudy Rucker - Realware" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

Wowos are math and bullshit!"

"Willow said the wowo pulled Da in like it was—a garbage disposal. She said that. She's hysterical. She shouldn't be
driving."

"I'll call her. I love you, Jane."

"I love you too, Phil. Be strong. I'll see you tonight. I'm going to the airport right now."

Phil clicked off the uvvy and the room was quiet. His eyes felt so strange —bulging and puffy and aching. They
wanted to cry, but for now they were dry. He imagined a wowo in his father's head. Light streaming out of his father's
eye-sockets.

"Oh, poor Phil," said Kevvie. "It's terrible to lose your father. I want you to know that I'm here for you. But what was
that about a wowo? That hologram thingie? Willow says that's what killed your father? A ball of colored light? The
gimmie aren't going to buy it. She should get a top attorney right away!"

"That's too — " Phil began, but broke off with a vague gesture. In his mind the full sentence was, "That's too stupid
and autistic of you to deserve an answer," but he didn't have the heart to start a fight. Kevvie's inability to visualize
other people's feelings was so extreme that Phil had come to think of it as a clinical psychiatric condition. Indeed,
Kevvie habitually chewed a popular empathy-enhancement gum in a perhaps unconscious effort to try and correct her
deficit. "E-gum makes you part-of," as the chanted commercials had it. But it seemed like the only person that e-gum
made Kevvie more sensitive to was Kevvie. All these angry thoughts went racing through Phil's head as he made the
little gesture. He reminded himself that he liked Kevvie. His father's death was filling him with irrational rage.

Da dead. Phil groaned and got out of bed, sliding the groan down into a keening moan. This hurt so much that he
needed to keep making noise.

He wore only a plain white T-shirt. His butt was small, his legs were short and nimble. Phil's mother Eve was Greek,
while his father Kurt had been German. Phil's body hair and chin-stubble were dark, but the hair on his head was a
floppy shock of blond. His sly, hooded eyes and sardonic lips made him look dissipated, which was misleading. Phil
had been clean and sober his whole life. When the mandatory grade-school screening had revealed that Phil carried
the genes for alcoholism and drug addiction, Phil had taken it to heart and decided to spend his life Straight Edge. A
singularly mature decision for one so young—with the bonus of providing a way to be superior to Da, who'd been
quite fond of booze and pot.

Phil's room was bright and messy, an odd-shaped room with a peaked ceiling and walls that slanted out on two sides.
There was a lot of empty space near the ceiling, and Phil had some home-built robot blimps cruising around up there
like sluggish tropical fish. Flying machines of all kinds were Phil's hobby. The blimps were like pets, and Phil had
names for them: one was Led Zep of course, the others were the Graf Z, the Macon, the Penile Implant, and the largest
and most colorful was the Uffin Wowo. The last name was a riff on Da's brilliant uvvy graphic that had somehow
ended in disaster less than an hour ago. Da dead. Life ends in tears.

Distractedly humming, Phil put on some thick red tights he'd gotten from the thrift store. There was gray morning light
from the room's skylight. Kevvie sat on a rolling desk chair, chewing e-gum and watching him.

Phil swung open his room's arched mouse-hole door to reveal the interior of what looked like a factory. His room was
located inside a bigger room, that is, Phil's room was a wooden box on stilts inside a subdivided warehouse down near
the bay-side Port of San Francisco. Some developer had sliced the giant warehouse up into five or six strips, and Phil
rented one of the strips along with two other people: a guy called Derek and a woman named Calla. Derek was a chaos