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

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NEAL STEPHENSON
37
get serious about it. Cet serious. Get serious. But it's so hard to get
serious about anything.
He owes the Mafia the cost of a new car. That's a good reason to get
serious.
He cuts straight across the Street and under the monorail line, headed
for a large, low-slung black building. It is extraordinarily somber for the
Street, like a parcel that someone forgot to develop. It's a squat black
pyramid with the top cut off. It has one single door-since this is all
imaginary, there are no regulations dictating the number of emergency exits.
There are no guards, no signs, nothing to bar people from going in, yet
thousands of avatars mifi around, peering inside, looking for a glimpse of
something. These people can't pass through the door because they haven't
been invited.
Above the door is a matte black hemisphere about a meter in diameter,
set into the front wall of the building. It is the closest thing the place
has to decoration. Underneath it, in letters carved into the wall's black
substance, is the name of the place: THE
BLACK SUN.
So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Him and the
other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire
architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes.
The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care.
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be
able to reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system
that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor
every.single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them
from running into each other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this
incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through
each other.
So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really
is cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the
computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and
translucent so you can see where you're going. Hiro appears solid to
himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as
if it's a fogbank, clearly seeing The Black Sun in front of him.
38
SNOW CRASH
He steps over the property line, and he's in the doorway. And in that
instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As
one, they all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he
is-Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a UStor-It by the
airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people
who can step over the line into The Black Sun.
He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that
he's all by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of
avatars, he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with