"Travis S. Taylor - The Quantum Connection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor Travis S)

remember back when I started it that I was hooked for the first two semesters at college. That's why I
nearly got booted out for bad grades and was placed on probation with my scholarship. But I didn't want
to lose my meal ticket away from home, so I put down the controllers and picked up the books. Well,
sort of.
Miles had come to the shop asking if I could show him how to get to Xios. He had been begging me
to show him for months. I told him he had to try first. Neat thing about The Realm that is unlike video
games of the past, there are no cheat books that you can buy to figure out how to slay a beast or open a
doorway. Oh sure, there are some pirate Framework sites out there that give tips, but as soon as one
mentions The Realm the copyright police shut 'em down. RealmSoft was smart in that they registered
and/or bought all rights to the concept. If you want to learn how to do something inside, you have to go
inside and buy it from a RealmSoft vendor on the streets of Realm Central City. For example, the tips I
discovered and sold were posted in Central City and I was paid a royalty credit to my account with
RealmSoft for each tip sold. If the pirate sites outside get caught, RealmSoft not only litigates but they
also change the laws inside The Realm. Neat business, huh? RealmSoft has a shakedown on all us
Sequencers that we can do nothing about, since Sequencing is so damned fun and we're all addicted to it.
So I had been showing Miles here how to trip from one planet to another, specifically to Xios.
Someone must have told him there was a Node on Xios. It wasn't me, but I will, for a price. The buzzer
on the door bzzzed and a guy in a tie came in and talked to Robert.
"He's over there." Robert pointed at me.
I handed the controllers over to Miles, "Okay kid, I gotta take care of something else, it looks like."
Miles palmed me twenty bucks and went back to playing the game. I slipped the twenty in my pocket
nonchalantly and greeted the suit. "Can I help you with something?"
"Hi, I'm Larry Waterford. I dropped off that old game system for repair a couple weeks ago." He
held his hand out to me and I shook it.
"Which one? We get a lotta stuff in here." I shrugged my shoulders at him.
"Here's the ticket the fellow over there gave me when I brought it in." He handed me a bin number.
It was the ancient system that I had spent so much time on. "Oh yeah, I remember this one all right. It
gave me quite a fit to fix. Well, actually the console was not in too bad shape. I just replaced a capacitor
and tuned up the motherboard and added a new fan. The games on the other hand were all scratched
up." I scratched my head and tried to remember where I had put the box. "Ah yes, here it is under here."
"So you couldn't get the games to work, then?" he asked.
"Oh no, I didn't mean that. I cleaned them and resurfaced them and all of them worked but this one
here." I pulled out the broken disc and showed him. "You see these two cracks here go all the way
through the disk. I tried everything but couldn't save this disk." I rummaged through the box for the new
version I made him.
"Oh well," he interrupted. "At least some of them still work."
"Hold on, I wasn't finished yet. As I said, I couldn't get this disk repaired. So, I copied it and hacked
the encryption code into my Sequencing system at home and found where it was damaged. I rewrote the
game code where it was scrambled, re-encrypted it, and then copied the file back onto this disk here." I
handed him the disk. "It plays great! You can't even tell where I spliced the code."
"You mean you reverse-engineered the game and fixed it?" Mr. Waterford asked.
"Uh, yeah if you say so." I just shook my head and handed him the box. "If you have any more
problems with it, just bring it back to me. But it should work fine for a while. Who knows with those old
systems like that."
"I hate to ask this, but what do I owe you?"
"Let's see." I took the ticket and scanned it. The computer rang up the total repairs and parts. "That
looks like eight dollars for the parts, thirty-five for the labor, taxes, blah blah blah . . . comes to forty-six
dollars and forty-four cents. All our services come with a thirty-day guarantee and you can buy a
ninety-day one for fifteen dollars. You interested?"
"Not really." He shook his head no.