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

a warped and bubbled expanse of vinyl siding on the wall of the house that
the perp was trying to break into. Thought it was a pretty righteous bust.
But they fired him anyway because the perp turned out to be the son of the
vice-chancellor of the Farms of Merryvale. Oh, the weasels had an excuse:
said that a thirty-six.inch samurai sword was not on their Weapons Protocol.
Said that he had violated the SPAC, the Suspected Perpetrator Apprehension
Code. Said that the perp had suffered psychological trauma. He was afraid of
butter knives now; he had to spread his jelly with the back of a teaspoon.
They said that he bad exposed them to liability.
The Deiverator had to borrow some money to pay for it. Had to borrow it
from the Mafia, in fact. So he's in their database now-retinal patterns,
DNA, voice graph, fingerprints, footprints, palm prints, wrist prints, every
flicking part of the body that had wrinkles on it-almost-those bastards
rolled in ink and made a print and digitized it into their computer. But
it's their money-sure they're careful about loaning it out. And when he
applied for the Deliverator job they were happy to take him, because they
knew him. When he got the loan, he had to deal
NEAL STEPHENSON
7
personally with the assistant vice-capo of the Valley, who later
recommended him for the Deliverator job. So it was like being in a family. A
really scary, twisted, abusive family.
CosaNostra Pizza #3569 is on Vista Road just down from Kings Park Mall.
Vista Road used to belong to the State of California and now is called
Fairlanes, Inc. Rte. CSV-5. Its main competition used to be a U.S. highway
and is now called Cruise- ways, Inc Rte. Cal-12. Farther up the Valley, the
two competing highways actually cross. Once there had been bitter disputes,
the intersection closed by sporadic sniper fire. Finally, a big developer
bought the entire intersection and turned it into a drive~through mall. Now
the roads just feed into a parking system-not a lot, not a ramp, but a
system-and lose their identity. Getting through the intersection involves
tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of
direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. CSV-5 has better throughput, but
Cal.12 has better pavement. That is typical-Fairlanes roads emphasize
getting you there, for Type A drivers, and Cruiseways emphasize the
enjoyment of the ride, for Type B drivers.
The Deliverator is a Type A driver with rabies. He is zeroing in on his
home base, CosaNostra Pizza #3569, cranking up the left lane of CSV-5 at a
hundred and twenty kilometers. His car is an invisible black lozenge, just a
dark place that reflects the bin-nd of franchise signs-the loglo. A row of
orange lights burbies and churns across the front, where the grille would be
if this were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline
fire. It comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview
mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their
subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious,
under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the
Deiverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire.
The loglo, overhead, marking out CSV-5 in twin contrails, is a body of
electrical light made of innumerable cells, each cell designed in Manhattan
by imageers who make more for designing a single logo than a Deliverator