"Neal Stephenson - The Great Simoleon Caper (ss) v1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

"Your brother runs an ad agency, no?"

"Correct."

"He recently signed up Simoleons Corp.?"

"Correct."

"As soon as he did, the government put your house under full-time surveillance."

Suddenly the glass eyeball in the front of the set-top box is looking very big and beady to me. "They tapped our infotainment cable?"

"Didn't have to. The cable people are happy to do all the dirty work -- after all, they're beholden to the government for their monopoly. So all those calculations you did using Raster were piped straight to the cable company and from there to the government. We've got a mole in the government who cc'd us everything through an anonymous remailer in Jyvaskyla, Finland."

"Why should the government care?"

"They care big-time," Codex says. "They're going to destroy Simoleons. And they're going to step all over your family in the process."

"Why?"

"Because if they don't destroy E-money," Codex says, "E-money will destroy them."

The next afternoon I show up at my brother's office, in a groovily refurbished ex-power plant on the near West Side. He finishes rolling some calls and then waves me into his office, a cavernous space with a giant steam turbine as a conversation piece. I think it's supposed to be an irony thing.

"Aren't you supposed to be cruising the I-way for stalled motorists?" he says.

"Spare me the fraternal heckling," I say. "We crypto-anarchists don't have time for such things."

"Crypto-anarchists?"

"The word panarchist is also frequently used."

"Cute," he says, rolling the word around in his head. He's already working up a mental ad campaign for it.

"You're looking flushed and satisfied this afternoon," I say. "Must have been those two imperial pints of Hog City Porter you had with your baby-back ribs at Divane's Lakeview Grill."

Suddenly he sits up straight and gets an edgy look about him, as if a practical joke is in progress, and he's determined not to play the fool.

"So how'd you know what I had for lunch?"

"Same way I know you've been cheating on your taxes."

"What!?"

"Last year you put a new tax-deductible sofa in your home office. But that sofa is a hide-a-bed model, which is a no-no."

"Hackers," he says. "Your buddies hacked into my records, didn't they?" "You win the Stratolounger."

"I thought they had safeguards on these things now."