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

home where you could take regular showers."
"Sure, I was working, but I never said I wanted a job, Mom. I said I wanted to learn about
bikes. There's a big difference! I can't be a loser wage-slave for some lousy bike franchise."
His mother said nothing.
"Mom, I'm not asking you for any favors. I don't need any bosses, or any teachers, or any
landlords, or any cops. It's just me and my bike work down here. I know that people in authority
can't stand it that a twenty-four-year-old man lives an independent life and does exactly what he
wants, but I'm being very quiet and discreet about it, so nobody needs to bother about me."
His mother sighed, defeated. "Are you eating properly, Lyle? You look peaked."
Lyle lifted his calf muscle into camera range. "Look at this leg! Does that look like the
gastrocnemius of a weak and sickly person?"
"Could you come up to the condo and have a decent meal with me sometime?"
Lyle blinked. "When?"
"Wednesday, maybe? We could have pork chops."
"Maybe, Mom. Probably. I'll have to check. I'll get back to you, okay? Bye." Lyle hung up.
Hooking the mediator's cable to the primitive set-top box was a problem, but Lyle was not one
to be stymied by a merely mechanical challenge. The enamel job had to wait as he resorted to
miniclamps and a cable cutter. It was a handy thing that working with modern brake cabling had
taught him how to splice fiber optics.
When the set-top box finally came online, its array of services was a joke. Any decent modern
mediator could navigate through vast information spaces, but the set-top box offered nothing but
"channels." Lyle had forgotten that you could even obtain old-fashioned "channels" from the city
fiber-feed in Chattanooga. But these channels were government-sponsored media, and the
government was always quite a ways behind the curve in network development. Chattanooga's
huge fiber-bandwidth still carried the ancient government-mandated "public access channels,"
spooling away in their technically fossilized obscurity, far below the usual gaudy carnival of
popular virching, infobahnage, demo-splintered comboards, public-service rants, mudtrufflage,
rem-snorkeling, and commercials.
The little set-top box accessed nothing but political channels. Three of them: Legislative,
Judicial, and Executive. And that was the sum total, apparently. A set-top box that offered
nothing but NAFTA political coverage. On the Legislative Channel there was some kind of
parliamentary debate on proper land use in Manitoba. On the Judicial Channel, a lawyer was
haranguing judges about the stock market for air-pollution rights. On the Executive Channel, a
big crowd of hicks were idly standing around on windblown tarmac somewhere in Louisiana
waiting for something to happen.
 The box didn't offer any glimpse of politics in Europe or the Sphere or the South. There were
no hotspots or pips or index tagging. You couldn't look stuff up or annotate it -- you just had to
passively watch whatever the channel's masters chose to show you, whenever they chose to show
it. This media setup was so insultingly lame and halt and primitive that it was almost perversely
interesting. Kind of like peering through keyholes.
Lyle left the box on the Executive Channel, because it looked conceivable that something
might actually happen there. It had swiftly become clear to him that the intolerably monotonous
fodder on the other two channels was about as exciting as those channels ever got. Lyle retreated
to his workbench and got back to enamel work.
At length, the President of NAFTA arrived and decamped from his helicopter on the tarmac in
Louisiana. A swarm of presidential bodyguards materialized out of the expectant crowd, looking
simultaneously extremely busy and icily unperturbable.
Suddenly a line of text flickered up at the bottom of the screen. The text was set in a very old-
fashioned computer font, chalk-white letters with little visible jagged pixel-edges. "Look at him
hunting for that camera mark," the subtitle read as it scrolled across the screen. "Why wasn't he