"FWLS60" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

"Big deal," he said, picking up the Billy Joel crate again.
"I could make twice as much hacking networks."

"Then why aren't you?" I asked, smirking.

"Don't feel like it," he replied, marching off to the blue
wing, MPEG-CD2s rattling in the crate.

I picked him well; some junior high type. Just got a
computer and decided that VOSNet was for lamers (he had SOME
intelligence). He liked to claim he was some powerful hacker
type, but he didn't even know how to make his own objicons. That
was the key; he needed the money but couldn't admit that he
didn't know how to get it himself. Perfect for a toadie job.

The attitude was common, though. Nobody seemed to realize
just how pop culture worked. In a compressed area, like a single
planet, trends repeat every thirty years. In the universe, it
takes a little longer... trends have more room to spread, and
spread slowly through the populace. Grunge was just starting to
to peak around C'atel, the city that 'spawned' it.

Respawning is a better term. The Golden Age, the twentieth
century, was well into revival without anybody knowing it. The
whole concept of two nets, one corp controlled and the other
anarchy controlled was straight out of the very late twentieth
century, when SubNet formed as a free, uncontrolled alternative
to the pay-service dominated and government regulated Internet.
There was conflict back then too, mirroring the hacker purges of
this decade, and eventually things settled down.

How quickly humanity forgot itself after getting warp
technology! Internet fell into disuse, as holophone technology
spawned chat services, 1-900 lines and information servers. Even
this was starting to go the way of nets, as the kids and
terrorists alike went on underground links to avoid Terran
Confederation encryption chip policies.

Then we come to VOSNet and UberNet, and we're full circle
for the third time. The silly thing is that people claim it's an
original idea. Like gangsta folk music is original, like
backwards hats are original, like cheaply produced kids' action
shows with recycled foreign footage are original.

"We almost done?" the kid asked, returning from the blue
wing. "The War of the CyberTroops is coming on HV."

I grinned. "If only you knew... yeah, okay, you're done for
the day."