"Neal Stephenson - Spew" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

Spew
Are you on the trail of the next unexpoilted market niche - or just on a nookie
hunt?
New fiction by Neal Stephenson



Yeah, I know it's boring of me to send you plain old Text like this, and I hope
you don't just blow this message off without reading it.
But what can I say, I was an English major. On video, I come off like a stunned
bystander. I'm just a Text kind of guy. I'm gambling that you'll think it's
quaint or something. So let me just tell you the whole sorry tale, starting from
the point where I think I went wrong.
I'd be blowing brown smoke if I said I wasn't nervous when they shoved in the
needles, taped on the trodes, thrust my head into the Big Cold Magnet, and
opened a channel direct from the Spew to my immortal soul. Of course they didn't
call it the Spew, and neither did I - I wanted the job, after all. But how could
I not call it that, with its Feeds multifarious as the glistening strands
cascading sunnily from the supple scalps of the models in the dandruff shampoo
ads.
I mention that image because it was the first thing I saw when they turned the
Spew on, and I wasn't even ready. Not that anyone could ever get ready for the
dreaded Polysurf Exam. The proctors came for me when they were ready, must have
got my address off that job app yellowing in their infinite files, yanked me
straight out of a fuzzy gray hangover dream with a really wandering story arc,
the kind of dream concussion victims must have in the back of the ambulance. I'd
been doing shots of vodka in the living room the night before, decided not to
take a chance on the stairs, turned slowly into a mummy while I lay comatose on
our living-room couch - the First Couch Ever Built, a Couch upholstered in
avocado Orlon that had absorbed so much tar, nicotine, and body cheese over the
centuries that now the centers of the cushions had developed the black sheen of
virgin Naugahyde. When they buzzed me awake, my joints would not move nor my
eyes open: I had to bolt four consecutive 32-ounce glasses of tap water to
reconstitute my freeze-dried plasma.
Half an hour later I'm in Television City. A million stories below, floes of
gray-yellow ice, like broken teeth, grind away at each other just below the
surface of the Hudson. I've signed all the releases and they're lowering the
Squid helmet over me, and without any warning BAM the Spew comes on and the
first thing I see is this model chick shaking her head in ultra-slow-mo, her
lovely hairs gleaming because they've got so many spotlights cross-firing on her
head that she's about to burst into flame, and in voice-over she's talking about
how her dandruff problem is just a nasty, embarrassing memory of adolescence now
along with pimples and (if I may just fill in the blanks) screwing skanky guys
who'll never have a salaried job. And I think she's cute and everything but it
occurs to me that this is really kind of sick - I mean, this chick has admitted
to a history of shedding blizzards every time she moved her head, and here she
is getting down under eight megawatts of color-corrected halogen light, and I
just know I'm supposed to be thinking about how much head chaff would be sifting
down in her personal space right now if she hadn't ditched her old hair care