"Neal Stephenson - Snowcrash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because
they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result,
this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it-talking trade
balances here-once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have
evened out, they're making
NEAL STEPHENSON
3
cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here-once our edge in natural
resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North
Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel-once the Invisible Hand has taken all those
historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani
brickmaker would consider to be prosperity-y'know what? There's only four things we do better than
anyone else

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery

The Deiverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary
school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so
bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved-but no cooperation either. Just
a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it
free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working
this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a
pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red.faced
and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their
glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I
swear, can't you guys tell time?
Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry. People went to
CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an


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English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about
pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of
doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating
tactics, the
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SNOW CRASH
voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class
Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their
personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going
to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza;
no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was
fucking inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to