"FWLS36" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

about the site. I crashed on his couch. I woke up in a
different room.

Well, not different. It just LOOKED different. There
weren't any piles of magazines, no dirty socks, no jumbled up
tangle of wires. Gosub must have cleaned, and I mean *CLEANED*,
when I was out of the waking world.

"Hey there, pal," Harden said. He looked the same in
reality as virtual reality, too, although he didn't have the suit
on at the time. "Hear we get to save the virtual world today.
Sounds like fun. You ready?"

"Got any cornflakes?" I asked, rubbing that white eye gunk
out of my lids.

"Not really," Max said. "Here, have a candy bar."

"Jeez, Max, you're such a little sugar demon, aren't you?"
Harden laughed.

"Keeps me on the edge," Max said. I could tell he was
shaking, calories scraping the sky. There was a slight blur
around his edges.

"Nintekjis for sale," Gosub sang, wandering into the room
with a cobweb-ridden wooden box. "Let's try not to melt this one
down on a simple training run this time, okay Max?"

Max nodded a little to fast for me to see, and pushed the
smoking remains of his old terminal out of the way.

The room was cleaned and tidy, except for the mass of cables
in the center which linked the three aging hackers to a trio of
old television sets. Each had a view of the matrix, normally 3-D
gridlines of brilliant blue being reduced to cheap 2-D vector
lines.

"Alright. Gentlemen, start your engines," Gosub announced,
pulling on his plastic and rubber glove. "I've fed the address
into your systems, and you should be there now. Random, I need
you on neural link."

"Huh?"

"Well, we can't see real well out of these things. I've got
a much better grade of 3-D headset here, but only one."

"Why don't YOU use it?"