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

You and Evan hand over the helm to the Irish girl. Then, like Picard and Riker
on their way to Ten Forward after a long day of sensitive negotiations, you head
straight for Elevator Three, the only one that seems to be hooked up. So I check
out the elevator activity transcript too - not to be monotonous or anything, but
it's all on the Spew - and sho nuff, it seems that you and Evan went straight to
the seventh floor. You're in there, I realize, with your guitar-player bud who
wears shorts in the middle of the winter, and you're drinking bad beer and Mai
Tais from my Robobar.
I monitor the Spew traffic to Room 707. You did some random surfing like anyone
else, sort of as foreplay, but since then you've just been hoovering up gigabyte
after gigabyte of encrypted data.
It's gotta be media; only media takes that many bytes. It's coming from an
unknown source, definitely not the big centralized Spew nodes - but it's been
forwarded six ways from Sunday, it's been bounced off Indian military
satellites, divided into tiny chunks, disguised as credit card authorizations,
rerouted through manual telephone exchanges in Nigeria, reassembled in pirated
insurance-company databases in the Netherlands. Upshot: I'll never trace it back
to its source, or sources.
What is 10 times as weird: you're putting data out. You're talking back to the
Spew. You have turned your room - my room - into a broadcast station. For all I
know, you've got a live studio audience packed in there with you.
All of your outgoing stuff is encrypted too.
Now. My rig has some badass code-breaking stuff built into it, Profile Auditor
warez, but all of it just bounces off. You guys are cypherpunks, or at least you
know some. You're using codes so tough they're illegal. Conclusion: you're
talking to other people - other people like you - probably squatting in other
Kensington Place hotel rooms all over the world at this moment.
Everything's falling into place. No wonder Kensington Place has such legendarily
shitty service. No wonder it's so unprofitable. The whole chain has been
infiltrated.
And what's really brilliant is that all the weird shit you're pulling off the
Spew, all the hooch you're pulling out of my Robobar, is going to end up tacked
onto my Profile, while you end up looking infuriatingly normal.
I kind of like it. So I invest another half-hour of my life waiting for an
elevator, take it down to the lobby, go out to a 24-hour mart around the corner
and buy two six-packs - one of the fashionable downmarket swill that you are
drinking and one of your brand of mineral water. I can tell you're cool because
your water costs more than your beer.
Ten minutes later I'm standing in front of 707, sweating like a high school kid
in a cheesy tuxedo on prom night. After a few minutes the sheer patheticity of
this little scene starts to embarrass me and so I tuck a six under my arm and
swipe my card through the slot. The little green light winks at me knowingly. I
shoulder through the door saying, "Honey, I'm home!"
No response. I have to negotiate a narrow corridor past the bath and closets
before I can see into the room proper. I step out with what I hope is a
non-creepy smile. Something wet and warm sprays into my face. It trickles into
my mouth. It's on the savory side.
The room's got like 10 feet of open floor space that you have increased to 15 by
stacking the furniture in the bathroom. In the midst of this is the guitar dude,
stripped to his colorful knee-length shorts. He is playing his ax, but it's not