"Walter Jon Williams - Daddy's World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

Mister Jeepers came spiraling down, an expression of comic terror on his face, and smashed to
the ground where Jamie pointed. Jamie pointed at the sight of the crumpled body and laughed.
"Jamie's home at last!" Mister Jeepers said.

****

As soon as Jamie could, he got one of the programmers at the University to fix him up a
flight program like the one Mister Jeepers had been using. He swooped and soared, zooming like a
super hero through the sky, stunting between the towers of El Castillo and soaring over upturned,
wondering faces in the Forum.
He couldn't seem to go as fast as he really wanted. When he started increasing speed, all the
scenery below paused in its motion for a second or two, then jumped forward with a jerk. The
software couldn't refresh the scenery fast enough to match his speed. It felt strange, because
throughout his flight he could feel the wind on his face.
So this, he thought, was why his car couldn't go fast.
So he decided to climb high. He turned his face to the blue sky and went straight up. The
world receded, turned small. He could see the Castle, the hills of Whirlikin Country, the crowded
Forum, the huge oval of the Circus Maximus. It was like a green plate, with a fuzzy, nebulous
horizon where the sky started.
And, right in the center, was the little two-storey frame house where he'd grown up.
It was laid out below him like scenery in a snow globe.
After a while he stopped climbing. It took him a while to realize it, because he still felt
the wind blowing in his face, but the world below stopped getting smaller.
He tried going faster. The wind blasted onto him from above, but his position didn't change.
He'd reached the limits of his world. He couldn't get any higher.
Jamie flew out to the edges of the world, to the horizon. No matter how he urged his program
to move, he couldn't make his world fade away.
He was trapped inside the snow globe, and there was no way out.

****

It was quite a while before Jamie saw Becca again. She picked her way through the labyrinth
beneath El Castillo to his throne room, and Jamie slowly materialized atop his throne of skulls.
She didn't appear surprised.
"I see you've got a little Dark Lord thing going here," she said.
"It passes the time," Jamie said.
"And all those pits and stakes and tripwires?"
"Death traps."
"Took me forever to get in here, Digit. I kept getting de-rezzed."
Jamie smiled. "That's the idea."
"Whirlikins as weapons," she nodded. "That was a good one. Bored a hole right through me, the
first time."
"Since I'm stuck living here," Jamie said, "I figure I might as well be in charge of the
environment. Some of the student programmers at the University helped me with some cool effects."
Screams echoed through the throne room. Fires leaped out of pits behind him. The flames
illuminated a form of Marcus Tullius Cicero, who hung crucified above a sea of flame.
"O tempora, o mores!" moaned Cicero.
Becca nodded. "Nice," she said. "Not my scene exactly, but nice."
"Since I can't leave," Jamie said, "I want a say in who gets to visit. So either you wait
till I'm ready to talk to you, or you take your chances on the death traps."