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

The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would
be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you
can't sell drugs in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at
something.
The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called
Snow Crash before. That's not unusual-a thousand new drugs get invented each
year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.
But adsnow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash- a bug-at
such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that
controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the
screen, turning the perfect gridwork of
SNOW cXASH
40
pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen it happen a million
times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug.
The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has
an utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which
would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of
sense. Hiro's trying to read some clues in the guy's face, but the closer he
looks, the more his shifty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into
jittering, hard-edged pixels. It's like putting his nose against the glass
of a busted TV. It makes his teeth hurt.
"Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?"
"You want to try some Snow Crash?"
He has a crisp accent that Hiro can't quite place. His audio is as bad
as his video. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. He
must be goggled in from a public terminal alongside some freeway.
"I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?"
"It's a drug, asshole," the guy saYs. "What do you think?"
"Wait a minute. This is a new one on me," Hiro says. "You honestly
think I'm going to give you some money here? And then what do I do, wait for
you to mail me the stuff?"
"I said try, not buy," the guy says. "You don't have to give me any
money. Free sample. And you don't.have to wait for no mail. You can have it
now."
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard.
It looks like a business card. The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. It
is used in the Metaverse to represent a chunk of data. It might be text,
audio, video, a still image, or any other information that can be
represented digitally.
Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some
numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the
player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete
biography, read by the player himself, in stereo digital sound; and a
complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you
look up the numbers you want.
A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information. For
all Hiro knows, this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of
Congress, or every episode of Hawaii
NEAL STEPHENSON