"Уильям Гибсон. Virtual light (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

the first time he'd ever slept beside a woman.

Now here he was in Los Angeles, driving a six-wheeled Hotspur Hussar
with twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer. The Hussar was an armored Land Rover that could
do a hundred and forty on a straightaway, assuming you could find one open and had the
time to accelerate. Hernandez, his shift super, said you couldn't trust an Englishman to
build anything much bigger than a hat, not if you wanted it to work when you needed it; he
said IntenSecure should've bought Israeli or at least Brazilian, and who needed Ralph
Lauren to design a tank anyway?

Rydell didn't know about that, but that paint job was definitely
trying too hard. He thought they probably wanted people to think of those big brown United
Parcel trucks, and at the same time they maybe hoped it would look sort of like something
you'd see in an Episcopal church. Not too much gilt on the logo. Sort of restrained.

The people who worked in the car wash were mostly Mongolian
immigrants, recent ones who had trouble getting better jobs. They did this crazy
throat-singing thing while they worked, and he liked to hear that. He couldn't figure out
how they did it; sounded like tree-frogs, but like it was two sounds at once.

Now they were buffing the rows of chromed nubs down the sides. Those
had been meant to support electric crowd-control grids and were just chromed for looks.
The riot-wagons in Knoxville had been electrified, but with this drip-system that kept
them wet, which was a lot nastier.

'Sign here,' said the crew boss, this quiet black kid named
Anderson. He was a medical student, days, and he always looked like he was about two
nights short of sleep.

Rydell took the pad and the light-pen and signed the
signature-plate. Anderson handed Rydell the keys.

'You ought to get you some rest,' Rydell said. Anderson grinned,
wanly. Rydell walked over to Gunhead, deactivating the door alarm.

Somebody had written that inside, 'GUNHEAD,' in green marker on the
panel above the windshield. The name stuck, but mostly because Sublett liked it. Sublett
was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect. He said his mother had been
getting ready to deed his ass to the church, whatever that meant.

Sublett wasn't too anxious to talk about it, but Rydell had gotten
the idea that these people figured video was the Lord's preferred means of communicating,
the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. 'He's in the de-tails,' Sublett had
said once. 'You gotta watch for Him close.' Whatever form this worship had taken, it was
evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met, mostly
old movies on channels that never ran anything but. Sublett said

Gunhead was the name of a robot tank in a Japanese monster movie.
Hernandez thought Sublett had written the name on there himself. Sublett denied it.
Hernandez said take it off. Sublett ignored him. It was still there, but Rydell knew