"Big U, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

FarmSun SweetFresh brand HomeLivin' Artificial Chocolate-
Flavored Dairy Beverage and forced them into the overflowing maw
below. He then removed his warped and sweat-soaked Plex map (the
Plexus) from his pocket and unfolded it on the woodtoned Fiberglass
surface.
As was noted at the base of the Plexus, it had been developed by
the AM Advanced Graphics Workshop. Rather than presenting maps
of each floor of the Plex, they had used an Integrated Projection to
show the entire Plex as a network of brightly colored paths and
intersections. The resulting tangle was so convoluted and yet so
clean and spare as to be essentially without meaning. Casimir,
however, could read it, because he was not like us. After applying
his large intelligence to the problem for several minutes he was able
to find the most efficient route, and following it with care, he quickly
became lost.
The mistake was a natural one. The elevators, which were busy
even in the dead of night, were today clogged with catatonic parents
from New Jersey clutching beanbag chairs and giant stuffed animals.
Fortunately (he thought), adjacent to each elevator was an entirely
unused stairwell.
Casimir discovered shortly afterward that in the lower floors of
the Plex all stairwell doors locked automatically from the outside.
I discovered it myself at about the same time. Unlike Casimir I
had been a the Plex for ten days, but I had spent them typing up
notes for my classes, It is unwise to prepare two courses in ten days,
and I knew it. I hadn't gotten to it until the last minute, for various
reasons, and so I'd spent ten days sitting there in my bicycling
shorts, drinking beer, typing, and sweating monumentally in the fetid
Plex air. So my first exposure to the Plex and its people really came
that afternoon, when I wandered out into the elevator lobby and
punched the buttons. The desperate Tylenol-charged throngs in the
elevators did not budge when the doors opened, because they
couldn't. They stared at me as though I were Son of Godzilla, which
I was used to, and I stared at them and tried to figure out how they
got that way, and the doors clunked shut. I discovered the stairways,
and once I got below the bottom of the tower and into the lower
levels, I also found that I was locked in.
For fifteen minutes I followed dimly lit stairs and corridors
smelling of graffiti solvent and superfluous floor wax, helplessly
following the paths that students would take if the Plex ever had to
be evacuated. Through little windows in the locked doors I peered
out of this twilight zone and into the different zones of the Plex—
Cafeteria, Union, gymnasia, offices—but my only choice was to
follow the corridors, knowing they would dump me into the ghetto
outside. At last I turned a corner and saw the wall glistening with
noisy grey outside light. At the end of the line, a metal door swung
silently in the breeze, emblazoned thus: FIRE ESCAPE ONLY.
WARNING—ALARM WILL SOUND.
I stepped out the door and looked down along, steep slope into
the canyon of the Turnpike.