"FWLS66" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

A Future We'd Like to See 1.66 - Way Out
By Stefan "Twoflower" Gagne (Copyright 1994)

The table had a cheery purple and yellow tablecloth on it.
It wasn't the red and white of a good country meal, or the yellow
and orange of a clown's hair; the combination of purple and
yellow signified nothing and had no connotations whatsoever.

The flower vase on the table was mostly an afterthought, an
attempt to make the whole situation seem more homey. It had
maybe an inch of water in it, scummy water plainly visible
through the transparent glass with an upraised impression of a
daisy on it; the two daisies in the vase jutted out at odd
angles, and gave the impression that they were plastic.

There was also an antique 286 here. I had never seen a 286
before, and didn't even know what one was until I saw this one;
it had an enhanced 101 key keyboard, an EGA monitor, and a little
toggle switch so you could lower it to 6mhz for applications that
ran too quickly on the 12mhz powerhorse. For someone who was
used to 'cyberspace', the beaten to death word, I was oddly
impressed by the power of it.

It was new and unique. With the constant race to be on the
CyberEdge with your CyberGear so you could be a CyberPunk, nobody
looked backwards. Well, some did, but they weren't important in
the views of the techno elite, who thought they were crafting
some form of high art with their neurointerfaced magic.

The computer had an autoexec and a config, running good 'ol
MS-DOS 3.3, an OS I had never heard of. There were three other
files on there, one an EXE, one a PAS source code, and one a DAT
file. Pascal? Nobody used pascal. Still, I didn't seem to care
where the machine came from or how old and archaic it was.
Nothing really mattered to me.

The boy who had given it to me was just as surreal as the
boxlike computer was. "You want a way out, right?" he asked. "I
know you do. Try this thing out, it's great. It's the only way
you'll get out."

Since then, my life was an enigma. I lost my job, I lost
all my contacts in the overused, done to death hacking industry,
I lost my little slut girlfriend who was just toadying up to the
big powerful cracker for drug money. I didn't care. I never
liked any of that shit. I spent hours and hours here in my
hovel, the scummiest housing available in C'atel ("The City That
Never Shuts Up") staring at the computer before I got the urge to
turn it on.