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

started out as a Profile Auditor 1 just like us and is now Vice President for
Dynamic Programming at Dynastic Communications Inc. and making eight to nine
digits a year depending on whether he gets around to exercising his stock
options. One day young Adderson was checking out a Profile that didn't fit in
with established norms, and by tracing the subject's social telephony web,
noticed a trend: Post-Graduate Existentialists who started going to church. You
heard me: Adderson single-handedly discovered the New Complacency.
It was an unexploited market niche of cavernous proportions: upwards of
one-hundredth of one percent of the population. Within six hours, Adderson had
descended upon the subject's moho with a Rapid Deployment Team of entertainment
lawyers and development assistants and launched the fastest-growing new channel
ever to wend its way into the thick braid of the Spew.
I'm figuring that there's something about you, girl, that's going to make me
into the next Adderson and you into the next Spew Icon - the voice of a
generation, the figurehead of a Spew channel, a straight polished shaft leading
direct to the heart of a hitherto unknown and unexploited market. I know how
awful this sounds, by the way.
So I stay late in my cubicle and dig a little deeper, rewinding your Profile
back into the mists of time. Your credit record is fashionably cratered - but
that's cool, even the God of the New Testament is not as forgiving as the
consumer credit system. You've blown many scarce dollars at your local BodyMod
franchise getting yourself pierced ("topologically enhanced"), and, on one
occasion, tattooed: a medium #P879, left breast. Perusal of BodyMod's graphical
database (available, of course, over the Spew) turns up "(c)1991 by Ray Troll of
Ketchikan, Alaska." BodyMod's own market research on this little gem indicates
that it first become widely popular within the Seattle music scene.
So the plot thickens. I check out of my cubicle. I decide to go undercover.
Wouldn't think a Profile Auditor 1 could pull that off, wouldja? But I'm just
like you, or I was a year ago. All I have to do is dig a yard deeper into the
sediments of my dirty laundry pile, which have become metamorphic under
prolonged heat and pressure.
As I put the clothes on it occurs to me that I could stand a little prolonged
heat and pressure myself.
But I can't be thinking about that, I'm a professional, got a job to do, and
frankly I could do without this unwanted insight. That's just what Ineed, for
the most important assignment of my career to turn into a nookie hunt. I try to
drive it from my mind, try to lose myself in the high-definition Spew terminals
in the subway car, up there where the roach motel placards used to be. They
click from one Feed to another following some irrational pattern and I wonder
who has the job of surfing the channels in the subway; maybe it's what I'll be
doing for a living, a week from now.
Just before the train pulls into your stop, the terminal in my face surfs into
episode #2489 of Hee Haw. It's a skit. The banjo picker is playing a bit part,
sitting on a bale of hay in the back of a pickup truck - chewing on a stalk of
grass, surprisingly enough. His job is to laugh along with the cheesy jokes but
he's just a banjo picker, not an actor, he doesn't know the drill, he can't keep
himself from looking at the camera - looking at me. I notice for the first time
that his irises are different colors. I turn up the collar on my jacket as I
detrain, feeling those creepy eyes on my neck.
I have already discovered much about the infrastructure of your life that is