"FWLS44" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

A Future We'd Like To See 1.44 - The Big Time
By Twoflower (Copyright 1994)

The alarm clock rang; 6 AM sharp, like... well, clockwork.
I'd have a single half hour to jack in before they discount a
day's wages, but make me work anyway.

These old bones may not be ancient, but they've aged enough.
How I'd kill to be in my twenties again, coding up those silly
shareware things. I thought they were just annoying, little
stepping stones on my way to the top. Turns out they'd be the
most fun I'd ever have with a compiler.

Most people think that hitting the big time is a good thing.
I thought that too, when the talent scout found me. I was
sitting in my usual booth at the back of the Peasluvdope when
this slick businessman walks up. Says I've got a bright future
at the Protege Corporation. They needed a game coder; I was a
game coder. They had vast sums of money they could pay me; I
wanted the vast sums of money they could pay me.

Yeah, I was paid well, I figured as I brushed my teeth.
I've got more cash than one man should have. Shame I never get
the chance to spend it. I even have to work on Saturdays.

So I signed up. Seemed like a good idea. Fluki kept
telling me it was a bad idea, selling out to the suits. I passed
it off as his usual anti-business ranting.

It was good, for awhile. I had good gear... REALLY good
gear, faster than my cheesy VOSNet laptop, more powerful. I
could make a game with full motion polygons, speech, music, the
works. And ONLINE games too; the main goal of Protege was to get
a major net hub going, providing easy information access for
people that didn't understand how to do it directly via a VOSNet
jack.

I took two stale poptarts out of the cabinet. Ten minutes
till worktime; had to eat them raw. Tastes a lot like sawdust
that way. So I had made games for them, lots of them; Protege
was just in development stages back then, and lots of wild stuff
was going on. It was fun stuff, not answering to anybody about
your games. I loaded one really great maze-shoot-'em-up with
gore and demons and stuff, and managed to work some great action
movie dialogue into the Fighter Jock program. Clearly my best
work ever. The period of free working was one of the best times
of my life.

THAT certainly didn't last long.