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

The sky and the ground are black, like a computer screen that hasn't
had anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and
the Street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from
constraints of physics and finance. But people in Hiro's neighborhood are
very good programmers, so it's tasteful. The houses look like real houses,
There are a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright reproductions and some fancy
Victoriana.
So it's always a shock to step out onto the Street, where everything
seems to be a mile high. This is Downtown, the most heavily developed area.
If you gaa couple of hundred kilometers in either direction, the development
will taper down to almost nothing, just a thin chain of streetlights casting
white pools on the black velvet ground. But Downtown is a dozen Manhattans,
embroidered with neon and stacked on top of each other.
In the real world-planet Earth, ReaIjty_+j~ere are some-
NEAL STEPHENSON 25

where between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of
them are making mud bricks or field~stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a
billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more
money than all of the others put together. Of these billion potential
computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers,
and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the
Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the
Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't
really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines
owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is
occupied by twice the population of New York City.
That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a
building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest,
best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.
It is a hundred meters wide, with a narrow monorail track running down
the middle. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that
enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly. A
lot of people just ride back and forth on it, looking at the sights. When
Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written
yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to
get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black
desert of the electronic night.





Y.T. has been privileged to watch many a young Clint plant his sweet
face in an empty Burbclave pooi during an unauthorized night run, but always
on a skateboard, never ever in a car. The landscape of the suburban night
has much weird beauty if you just look.
Back on the paddle again. It rolls across the yard on a set of RadiKS
Mark IV Smartwheels. She upgraded to said magical sprockets after the
following ad appeared in Thrasher magazine: