"Нейл Стефенсон. Snow Crash (Снежная лавина, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

one of them is important enough to kill, kidnap, or interrogate. Hiro owns a
couple of nice Nipponese swords, but he always wears them, and the whole
idea of stealing fantastically dangerous weapons presents the would-be perp
with inherent dangers and contradictions: When you are wrestling for
possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. Hiro also has a
pretty nice computer that he usually takes with him when he goes anywhere.
Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a
hangover.
At the moment, Vitaly Chernobyl is stretched out on a futon, quiescent,
and Hiro Protagonist is sitting crosslegged at a low table, Nipponese style,
consisting of a cargo pallet set on cmderbiocks.
As the sun sets, its red light is supplanted by the light of many neon
logos emanating from the franchise ghetto that constitutes this U-Stor-It's
natural habitat. This light, known as loglo, fills in the shadowy corners of
the unit with seedy, oversaturated colors.
Him has cappuccino skin and spiky, truncated dreadlocks. His hair does
not cover as much of his head as it used to, but he is a young man, by no
means bald or balding, and the slight retreat of his hairline only makes
more of his high cheekbones. He is wearing shiny goggles that wrap halfway
around his head the bows of the goggles have little earphones that are
plugged into his outer ears.
The earphones have some built-in noise cancellation features. This sort
of thing works best on steady noise. When jumbo jets make their takeoff runs
on the runway across the street, the sound is reduced to a low doodling hum.
But when Vitaly Chernobyl thrashes out an experimental guitar solo, it still
hurts Hiro's ears.
The goggles throw a light, smoky haze across his eyes and reflect a
distorted wide-angle view of a brilliantly lit boulevard that stretches off
into an infinite blackness. This boulevard does not really exist, it is a
computer-rendered view of an imaginary place.
Beneath this image, it is possible to see Hiro's eyes, which look
Asian. They are from his mother, who is Korean by way of Nippon. The rest of
him looks more like his father, who was African
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by way of Texas by way of the Army-back in the days before it got split
up into a number of competing organizations such as General Jim's Defense
System and Admiral Bob's National Security.
Four things are on the cargo pallet: a bottle of expensive beer from
the Puget Sound area, which Hiro cannot really afford; a long sword known in
Nippon as a katana and a short sword known as a wakizashi-Hiro's father
looted these from Japan after World War II went atomic-and a computer.
The computer is a featureless black wedge. It does not have a power
cord, but there is a narrow translucent plastic tube emerg. ing from a hatch
on the rear, spiraling across the cargo pallet and the floor, and plugged
into a crudely installed fiber-optics socket above the head of the sleeping
Vitaly Chernobyl. In the center of the plastic tube is a hair-thin
fiber.optic cable. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth
between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world. In order to transmit the
same amount of information on paper, they would have to arrange for a 747