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

that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face
than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can
appreciate the fme details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an
expensive hand-tailored gray wool suit.
You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk
beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the
people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere
(or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best
done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are
anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in
any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the
Street. Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.
If you are some peon who does not own a House, for example, a person
who is coming in from a public terminal, then you materialize in a Port.
There are 256 Express Ports on the street, evenly spaced around its
circumference at intervals of 256 kilometers. Each of these intervals is
further subdivided 256 times with Local Ports, spaced exactly one kilometer
apart (astute students of hacker semiotics will note the obsessive
repetition of the number 256, which is 2~ power-and even that 8 looks pretty
juicy, dripping with 22 additional 2s). The Ports serve a function analogous
to airports: This is where you drop into the Metaverse from somewhere else.
Once you have materialized in a Port, you can walk down the Street or hop on
the monorail or whatever.
The couples coming off the monorail can't afford to have custom avatars
made and don't know how to write their own. They have to buy off-the-shelf
avatars. One of the girls has a pretty nice one. It would be considered
quite the fashion state-
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ment among the K-Tel set. Looks like she has bought the Avatar
Construction Set" and put together her own, customized model out of
miscellaneous parts. It might even look something like its owner. Her date
doesn't look half bad himself.
The other girl is a Brandy. Her date is a Clint. Brandy and Clint are
both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white.trash high school girls are
going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the
computer-games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The
user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous.
Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute
and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her
eyelashes are half an inch long, and the software isso cheap that they are
rendered as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can
almost feel the breeze.
Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome
and has an extremely limited range of facial expressions.
Hiro wonders, idly, how these two couples got together. They are
clearly from disparate social classes. Perhaps older and younger siblings.
But then they come down the escalator and disappear nto the crowd and become
part of the Street, where there are enough Clints and Brandys to found a new
ethnic group.