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

limp and his eyes fluttering. "I got 'em."

"What? Got what? Jeezus, what did that thing do to your
mind?"

"Found it out... all of it... we're fine now. Again.
Everybody's... everything's fine."

His eyes stopped fluttering. He also stopped breathing.

"Aw, come on, man, don't die on us..." Max was pleading.
Harden shook his head.

"He's dead Max, face it," Harden said. "And I wanna know
why." Harden reached for the trodes.

"Harden, man, don't fool with that, you know what they say
about a dead man's deck--"

Harden hit the jack button. There wasn't any screaming, no
mumbling. Nothing. He jacked back out.

"It's gone," Harden said. "That site... all of it, even the
weird cloud thing... Gosub wiped the whole sector clean."

"Good lord!" Max gaped. "Why'd he do that? What killed
him?"

"There're a lot of scorch marks on the ground in there..."
Harden said. "Lots of scrambled data. Best guess says he was
fighting that cloud-thing. He must have known what it was.
Knowing that nothing, I mean NOTHING, unsettles Gosub, it must
have been something really, really horrible..."

Everybody looked back to the collapsed form of the elderly
hacker.

He was still grinning.

"I guess everything's fine," Harden shrugged.

*

I never did figure out what the cloud thing that killed
Gosub was, or why it had a script that would shut down the net.
I never did find out what had killed Gosub exactly, or why he had
sacrificed himself like that.

Maybe nobody'll ever know. I don't care anymore; I did my
part, I saved the virtual world from disaster. I don't jack at