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

There's going to be a Simoleons winner in every city.
We are allowed to take 15-minute breaks every four hours. So I crank up the Home
Theater, just to blow the carbon out of its cylinders, and zip down the main
street of the Metaverse to a club that specializes in my kind of tunes. I'm
still "wearing" my Raster uniform, but I don't care - I'm just one of thousands
of Rasters running up and down the street on their breaks.
My club has a narrow entrance on a narrow alley off a narrow side street, far
from the virtual malls and 3-D video-game amusement parks that serve as the cash
cows for the Metaverse's E-money economy. Inside, there's a few Rasters on
break, but it's mostly people "wearing" more creative avatars. In the Metaverse,
there's no part of your virtual body you can't pierce, brand or tattoo in an
effort to look weirder than the next guy.
The live band onstage - jacked in from a studio in Prague - isn't very good, so
I duck into the back room where there are virtual racks full of tapes you can
sample, listening to a few seconds from each song. If you like it, you can
download the whole album, with optional interactive liner notes, videos and
sheet music.
I'm pawing through one of these racks when I sense another avatar, something big
and shaggy, sidling up next to me. It mumbles something; I ignore it. A
magisterial throat-clearing noise rumbles in the subwoofer, crackles in the
surround speakers, punches through cleanly on the center channel above the
screen. I turn and look: it's a heavy-set creature wearing a T shirt emblazoned
with a logo HACKERS 1111. It has very long scythe-like claws, which it uses to
grip a hot-pink cylinder. It's much better drawn than Raster; almost
Disney-quality.
The sloth speaks: "537,824,167,720."
"Hey!" I shout. "Who the hell are you?" It lifts the pink cylinder to its lips
and drinks. It's a can of Jolt. "Where'd you get that number?" I demand. "It's
supposed to be a secret."
"The key is under the doormat," the sloth says, then turns around and walks out
of the club.
My 15-minute break is over, so I have to ponder the meaning of this through the
rest of my shift. Then, I drag myself up out of the couch, open the front door
and peel up the doormat.
Sure enough, someone has stuck an envelope under there. Inside is a sheet of
paper with a number on it, written in hexadecimal notation, which is what
computer people use: 0A56 7781 6BE2 2004 89FF 9001 C782 - and so on for about
five lines.
The sloth had told me that "the key is under the doormat," and I'm willing to
bet many Simoleons that this number is an encryption key that will enable me to
send and receive coded messages.
So I spend 10 minutes punching it into the set-top box. Raster shows up and
starts to bother me: "Can I help you with anything?"
By the time I've punched in the 256th digit, I've become a little testy with
Raster and said some rude things to him. I'm not proud of it. Then I hear
something that's music to my ears: "I'm sorry, I didn't understand you," Raster
chirps. "Please check your cable connections - I'm getting some noise on the
line."
A second figure materializes on the screen, like a digital genie: it's the sloth
again. "Who the hell are you?" I ask.