"Neal Stephenson - Simoleon Caper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

handy Plexiglas guillotine. Not a human being in sight, just robot restocking
machines trundling back and forth on a grid of overhead catwalks and
surveillance cameras hidden in smoked-glass hemispheres. I stroll through the
gleaming Lucite wonderland holding a perfect 6-in. cube improvised from duct
tape and cardboard. I stagger through a glitter gulch of Gummi fauna, Boston
baked beans, gobstoppers, Good & Plenty, Tart'n Tiny. Then, bingo: bulk jelly
beans, premium grade. I put my cube under the spout and fill it.
Who guesses closest and earliest on the jelly beans wins the Simoleons. They've
hired a Big Six accounting firm to make sure everything's done right. And since
they can't actually fill the stadium with candy, I'm to come up with the Correct
Answer and supply it to them and, just as important, to keep it secret.
I get home and count the beans: 3,101. Multiply by 8 to get the number in a
cubic foot: 24,808. Now I just need the number of cubic feet in Soldier Field.
My nephews are sprawled like pithed frogs before the HDTV, teaching themselves
physics by lobbing antimatter bombs onto an offending civilization from high
orbit. I prance over the black zigzags of the control cables and commandeer a
unit.
Up on the screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from
behind a window, then draws it back. No, I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic - this
is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes with the box. I ignore it, make my
escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the Metaverse where
thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an
ad for Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically
engineered and grown in vats. Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like
bunches of grapes in an amber fluid.
The animated sprite comes all the way out, and leans up against the edge of the
infomercial window. "Hey!" it says, in a goofy, exuberant voice, "I'm Raster!
Just speak my name - that's Raster - if you need any help."
I don't like Raster's looks. It's likely he was wandering the streets of
Toontown and waving a sign saying WILL ANNOY GROWNUPS FOR FOOD until he was
hired by the cable company. He begins flying around the screen, leaving a trail
of glowing fairy dust that fades much too slowly for my taste.
"Give me the damn encyclopedia!" I shout. Hearing the dread word, my nephews
erupt from the rug and flee.
So I look up Soldier Field. My old Analytic Geometry textbook, still flecked
with insulation from the attic, has been sitting on my thigh like a lump of ice.
By combining some formulas from it with the encyclopedia's stats . . .
"Hey! Raster!"
Raster is so glad to be wanted that he does figure eights around the screen.
"Calculator!" I shout.
"No need, boss! Simply tell me your desired calculation, and I will do it in my
head!"
So I have a most tedious conversation with Raster, in which I estimate the
number of cubic feet in Soldier Field, rounded to the nearest foot. I ask Raster
to multiply that by 24,808 and he shoots back: 537,824,167,717.
A nongeek wouldn't have thought twice. But I say, "Raster, you have Spam for
brains. It should be an exact multiple of eight!" Evidently my brother's new box
came with one of those defective chips that makes errors when the numbers get
really big.
Raster slaps himself upside the head; loose screws and transistors tumble out of