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

We sit in Television City cubicles, VR rigs strapped to our skulls, grokking
people's Profiles in n-dimensional DemoTainment Space, where demographics,
entertainment, consumption habits, and credit history all intersect to define a
weird imaginary universe that is every bit as twisted and convoluted as those
balloon animals that so eerily squelch and shudder from the hands of feckless
loitering clowns in the touristy districts of our great cities. Takes killer
spatial relations not to get lost. We turn our heads, and the Demosphere moves
around us; we point at something of interest - the distinct galactic cluster
formed by some schmo's Profile - and we fly toward it, warp speed. Hell, we fly
right through the middle of it, we do barrel rolls through said schmo's annual
mortgage interest statements and gambol in his urinalysis records. Course, the
VR illusion doesn't track just right, so most of us get sick for the first few
weeks until we learn to move our heads slowly, like tank turrets. You can always
tell a rookie by the scope patch glued beneath his ear, strong mouthwash odor,
gray lips.
Through the Demosphere we fly, we men of the Database Maintenance Division, and
although the Demosphere belongs to General Communications Inc., it is the schmos
of the world who make it - every time a schmo surfs to a different channel, the
Demosphere notes that he is bored with program A and more interested, at the
moment, in program B. When a schmo's paycheck is delivered over the I-way, the
number on the bottom line is plotted in his Profile, and if that schmo got it by
telecommuting we know about that too - the length of his coffee breaks and the
size of his bladder are an open book to us. When a schmo buys something on the
I-way it goes into his Profile, and if it happens to be something that he
recently saw advertised there, we call that interesting, and when he uses the
I-way to phone his friends and family, we Profile Auditors can navigate his
social web out to a gazillion fractal iterations, the friends of his friends of
his friends of his friends, what they buy and what they watch and if there's a
correlation.
So now it's a year later. I have logged many a megaparsec across the Demosphere,
I can pick out an anomalous Profile at a glance and notify my superiors. I am
dimly aware of two things: (1) that my yearly Polysurf test looms, and (2) I've
a decent chance of being promoted to Profile Auditor 2 and getting a cubicle
some 25 percent larger and with my choice from among three different color
schemes and four pre-approved decor configurations. If I show some
stick-to-it-iveness, put out some Second Effort, spread my legs on cue, I may
one day be issued a chair with arms.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Have to get through that Polysurf test
first. And I am oddly nervous. I am nervous because of Hee Haw.
Why did my subconscious brain surf away from Hee Haw? That wasn't like me at
all. And yet perhaps it was this that had gotten me the job.
Disturbing thought: the hangover. I was in a foul mood, short-tempered,
reactionary, literal-minded - in short, the temporary brain insult had turned me
into an ideal candidate for this job.
But this time they will come and tap me for the test at a random time, while I
am at work. I cannot possibly arrange to be hung over, unless I stay hung over
for two weeks straight - tricky to arrange. I am a fraud. Soon they will know;
ignominy, poverty will follow.
I am going to lose my job - my salaried job with medical and dental and even a
pension plan. Didn't even know what a pension was until the employee benefits