"FWLS63" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

*

I walked happily over the white squares of the freelanes. I
was safe here, at least from most of the problems that could be
haunting me.

The freelanes were a series of small sector clusters of
VOSNet that none of the companies had bought. Some rich
net.lover purchased them, and donated them away to free
information services. You couldn't get much on the freelanes,
but you could be assured that what you were getting was worth
what you'd pay for it.

Hence the term 'free'. It's a pun. I've never truly
grasped human puns in the three months I've lived in VOSNet.

Truth be known, I don't understand humans. They claim to
live in some other world, some world which is supposedly more
detailed and intense. Sounds like a load of dev-null to me.
They 'jack-out', whatever that entails, and vanish, but I think
they just transfer over to some ultra-detailed game or something.
I'd like to play it some time, but it seems AIs aren't allowed to
jack out.

I don't like humans. I don't even know why; just something
tells me I don't like humans. That's my problem, I know a lot of
things and believe in a lot of things, but I never figured out
what these things came from. I just know a lot of stuff.

One day, when I was penniless and bored, someone offered to
sell me some cheesy shareware game. I told them I was broke, and
said they also had this book they could sell me about how to use
your natural abilities to make millions of credits on VOSNet.

"I don't have any natural abilities," I had responded.

"Come on!" Canter (which was the con artist's name) had
said. "Surely there's something you know that nobody else does.
Information is gold, especially here in the freelances where it
is so scarce."

"Oh, sure, I know a lot. For instance,"

Ten minutes later.

"Good zorks, man! Sell that information! Hire yourself out
as a consultant and you'll rake in the credits!"

"I don't want to," I had said. "I've done it before and