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

middle of last year. At first it did minor things such as erasing
student programs, shutting the System down at odd times, et cetera.
Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the
Operator—the master program that controls the entire System—and
wreak vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center personnel
fought it for a while, but they were successful for only so long. The
Operator is a huge program and you have to know it all at once in
order to understand what the Worm is doing to it."
"Aha," I said, beginning to understand, "they needed someone
with a photographic memory. They needed another prodigy, didn't
they? So they got you? Is that it?"
At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person
they needed," he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me."
"Really? You're a free lance?"
"I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services.
You needn't know the details."
I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me
enough so that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was
very abstract work, consisting mostly of reading long strings of
numbers off the terminal and typing new ones in. On the night I sat
in, the Worm had eaten all of the alumni records for people living in
states beginning with "M." ("M!," said Virgil, "the worst letter it
could have picked.") Virgil was puttering around in various files to
see if the information had been stored elsewhere. He found about
half of Montana hidden between lines of an illegal video game
program, retrieved the data, erased the illegal program and caused
the salvaged information to be printed out on a string of payroll
check forms in a machine in the administrative bloc.
On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not
nobly saving erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was
actually arranging his living situation for the coming year. He had
about five choice rooms around the Plex, which he filled with
imaginary students in order to keep them vacant—an easy matter on
the computer. To support his marijuana and ale habits he extracted a
high salary from various sources, sending himself paychecks when
necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt, because Fred
Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work in the
Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop. To
support himseIf he took money from research accounts in proportion
to the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An
indispensable place like the Science Shop needed a strong leader,
someone bold enough to levy appropriate taxes against its users and
spend the revenues toward the ends those users desired. Virgil had
figured out how to do it, and made himself a niche at the Big U more
comfortable than anyone else's.


Sarah lived in a double room just five floors above me and
Ephraim Klein and John Wesley Fenrick, on E12S—E Tower,
twelfth floor, south wing. The previous year she had luxuriated in a