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

cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias to power.dive
into their unit every couple of minutes, forever.
Hiro can't really afford the computer either, but he has to have one.
It is a tool of his trade. In the worldwide community of hackers, Hiro is a
talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him
as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood,
which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he
can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed. And a
few short weeks ago, his tenure as a pizza deliverer-the only pointless
dead-end job he really enjoys-came to an end. Since then, he's been putting
a lot more emphasis on his auxiliary emergency backup job: freelance
stringer for the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation of Langley,
Virginia.
The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip,
videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document.
It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.

He uploads it to the CIC database-the Library, formerly the Library of
Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most peopie are not entirely
clear on what the word "congress" means.
NEAL STEPHENSON
21
And even the word "library" is getting hazy. It used to be a place full
of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records,
and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into
machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number
of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for
searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the
point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of
Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened
just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked
out a big fat stock offering.
Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading mfflions of other
fragments at the same time. CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and
Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if
they find a use for something that Him put into it, Hiro gets paid.
A year ago, he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole
from an igent's wastebasket in Burbank. Half a dozen studios wanted to see
it. He ate and vacationed off of that one for six months.
Since then, times have been leaner. He has been learning the hard way
that 99 percent of the information in the Library never gets used at all.
Case in point: After a certain Kourier tipped him off to the existence
of Vitaly Chernobyl, he put a few intensive weeks into researching a new
musical phenomenon-the rise of Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives in
L.A. He has planted exhaustive notes on this trend iii the Library,
including video and audio. Not one single record label, agent, or rock
critic has bothered to access it.
The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a
polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Wheneve- Hiro is using
the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with