Посвящается pashator и всем остальным застрявшим в Европе

[oryx_and_crake]

On most worlds, chaos had earned a new definition.
The majority of the Web’s economy disappeared with the local data-spheres and the Web megasphere. Trillions of hard-earned and ill-gotten marks ceased to be. Universal cards quit functioning. The machinery of daily life coughed, wheezed, and shut down. For weeks or months or years, depending upon the world, it would be impossible to pay for groceries, charge a ride on public transit, settle the simplest debt, or receive services without access to black market coins and bills.
But the webwide depression which had hit like a tsunami was a minor detail, reserved for later pondering. For most families, the effect was immediate and intensely personal.
Father or mother had ’cast off to work as usual, say from Deneb Vier to Renaissance V, and instead of arriving home an hour late this evening, would be delayed eleven years—if he or she could find immediate transit on one of the few Hawking drive spinships still traveling the hard way between the worlds.
Well-to-do family members listening to Gladstone’s speech in their fashionable multiworld residence looked up to stare at each other, separated by only a few meters and open portals between the rooms, blinked, and were separated by light-years and actual years, their rooms now opening onto nothing.
Children a few minutes away at school or camp or play or the sitter’s would be grown before they were reunited with parents.

Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

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