"FWLS37" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

his cheek. "Band aids will cover up the holes until then."

I looked at him oddly.

"Alright, MANY band aids. Look, what sort of explanation do
you want? Fairy story, something to calm your nerves, truth,
what?"

"Truth would be good."

"Alright. You're a net.boy, right? You cruise the net,
even if not for illegal purposes. Just looking for the ultimate
game fix. Well, you've heard of artificial intelligence, right?"

"I thought that was a myth..." I explained. "I mean, I
never saw one. There was a big hubbub about them on the Septic
Tank system a long time back..."

"I was one of the survivors of that," Twink said, puffing
away. "One of the few AIs that made it out. You've heard rumors
of Haven, right? Some odd floating castle in the sky
arrangement, some system not hooked up anywhere so you couldn't
access it from the net?"

"Yeah."

"It's true. All of it. That's where we, me and the other
AIs, stayed for a long time. Some AI engineer, he gets it in his
head that we can flee safely. We just need a way to change
dimensions... from VR to Real Life. So, the split up. Those who
wanted to hang around fled Haven to other places in the net,
holing up. Others, we got robot bodies built. That's me."

"But... man, you were REAL. Live. Lifelike."

"Am real. It's simulated, though," he said. "Really,
really, really, really, really, really GOOD simulation. I don't
see any differences myself, other than the electronic aspect.
You don't get aches. No pains. No zits. Pretty ideal. It's
been a great life so far, man, not being hunted by programmers
with pack dogs, walking around rez so good..."

"It's not rez."

"Exactly."

"So what happened? When we were playing the game."

"I'd like to ask you that, myself. I don't remember
diddley, just shutting down and ending up here, realizing there'd