"Bruce Sterling - Bicycle Repairman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Lyle devirched, checked his heart-rate record on the chronometer, then dismounted from his
stationary trainer and drained a half-liter squeezebottle of antioxidant carbo refresher. Life had
been easier when he'd had a partner in crime. The shop's flywheel was slowly losing its storage of
inertia power these days, with just one zude pumping it.
Lyle's disastrous second roommate had come from the biking crowd. She was a criterium
racer from Kentucky named Brigitte Rohannon. Lyle himself had been a wannabe criterium racer
for a while, before he'd blown out a kidney on steroids. He hadn't expected any trouble from
Brigitte, because Brigitte knew about bikes, and she needed his technical help for her racer, and
she wouldn't mind pumping the flywheel, and besides, Brigitte was lesbian. In the training gym
and out at racing events, Brigitte came across as a quiet and disciplined little politicized
treadhead person.
Life inside the zone, though, massively fertilized Brigitte's eccentricities. First, she started
breaking training. Then she stopped eating right. Pretty soon the shop was creaking and rocking
with all-night girl-on-girl hot-oil sessions, which degenerated into hooting pill-orgies with
heavily tattooed zone chyx who played klaxonized bongo music and beat each other up, and stole
Lyle's tools. It had been a big relief when Brigitte finally left the zone to shack up with some
well-to-do admirer on Floor 37. The debacle had left Lyle's tenuous finances in ruin.
 Lyle laid down a new tracery of scarlet enamel on the bike's chainstay, seat post and stem. He
had to wait for the work to cure, so he left the workbench, picked up Eddy's set-topper and
popped the shell with a hexkey. Lyle was no electrician, but the insides looked harmless enough:
lots of bit-eating caterpillars and cheap Algerian silicon.
He flicked on Eddy's mediator, to boot the wallscreen. Before he could try anything with the
cable-box, his mother's mook pounced upon the screen. On Eddy's giant wallscreen, the mook's
waxy, computer-generated face looked like a plump satin pillowcase. Its bow-tie was as big as a
racing shoe.
"Please hold for an incoming vidcall from Andrea Schweik of Carnac Instruments," the mook
uttered unctuously.
Lyle cordially despised all low-down, phone-tagging, artificially intelligent mooks. For a
while, in his teenage years, Lyle himself had owned a mook, an off-the-shelf shareware job that
he'd installed in the condo's phone. Like most mooks, Lyle's mook had one primary role: dealing
with unsolicited phone calls from other people's mooks. In Lyle's case these were the creepy
mooks of career counselors, school psychiatrists, truancy cops, and other official hindrances.
When Lyle's mook launched and ran, it appeared online as a sly warty dwarf that drooled green
ichor and talked in a basso grumble.
But Lyle hadn't given his mook the properly meticulous care and debugging that such fragile
little constructs demanded, and eventually his cheap mook had collapsed into artificial insanity.
Once Lyle had escaped his mom's place to the squat, he had gone for the low-tech gambit and
simply left his phone unplugged most of the time. But that was no real solution. He couldn't hide
from his mother's capable and well-financed corporate mook, which watched with sleepless
mechanical patience for the least flicker of video dialtone off Lyle's number.
Lyle sighed and wiped the dust from the video nozzle on Eddy's mediator.
"Your mother is coming online right away," the mook assured him.
"Yeah, sure," Lyle muttered, smearing his hair into some semblance of order.
"She specifically instructed me to page her remotely at any time for an immediate response.
She really wants to chat with you, Lyle."
"That's just great." Lyle couldn't remember what his mother's mook called itself. "Mr. Billy,"
or "Mr. Ripley," or something else really stupid...
"Did you know that Marco Cengialta has just won the Liege Summer Classic?"
Lyle blinked and sat up in the beanbag. "Yeah?"
"Mr. Cengialta used a three-spoked ceramic wheel with internal liquid weighting and