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

the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and
foreshortened on its surface.
1-liro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been prop.
erly laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was
stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept
bringing them back from his stints in the Far
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East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out
to show Him, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged
from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens
was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and
vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through
skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made him feel
naked and weak and brave.
The lens can see half of the universe-the half that is above the
computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep
track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers-a red one, a green one, and a
blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful
enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry
your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school,
these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to
produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards
of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the
use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep
back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as
the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous
Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image
can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a
second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional
image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye
can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little
earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic
soundtrack.
So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated
universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his
earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse.
Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metavase. It beats the shit out of the
U-Stor-It.
NEAL STEPHENSON
23
_________ Hiro is approaching the Street It is the Broadway, the Champs
Elys6es of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be
seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It
does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and
down it.
The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by