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

"I'm not talking about the net!" she said. "I mean real
life."

"Oh, that game everybody's playing?" I asked. "Hey, how do
I get in on that? It sounds interesting."

"We'll ignore your obvious addiction to all things digital
for now," the fortune teller growled, sitting back on her cushion
(I just now noticed how she was edging closer to me and clenching
a fist). "Tell me, do you know this woman from your past? A
wife? A former lover?"

"No way!" I protested. "No. I mean, I know her, but it
doesn't sound like anything like that. It's weird, I know. I
want to figure out who she is in the worst possible way. It's
bad enough that I need to walk around while awake with an
identity crisis, but to have another asleep is awful."

"Identity crisis?" she asked. She was confused, for a
change.

"Who am I?" I asked. "I've been in the country of VOSNet
for months now and nobody can tell me who I am. I don't know how
I got here, why I'm here, who this girl is, or ANYTHING."

"Wait a minute here," she asked, narrowing her eyes at me.
She reached down and tapped her crystal ball a few times,
examining a cheap 2-D map of text inside it. She glared back at
me.

"AI," she noted.

"Yeah. AI."

"I don't do AI memory gaps," she said. "For that, go see
some underground AI doctor. I only handle the lives of the
living."

"I feel pretty alive," I said.

"Go recheck your definition," she said coldly.

*

I walked down the freelane, annoyed at myself. I should
have known better than to expect sympathy from a human. Sure,
there were the occasional humans who didn't want to use my memory
as a cash tool, or to take me apart so they could make AI
compilers, or just to drag me into some cheap con as a fall guy,
but those humans were few and far between. For some reason,