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

version was," William concluded with, "But at least I didn't
write it. My tour of duty in the computer hall of shame was
over. Freddy took over as the Net.God and I retired happily in
the Macroware Home for the Mentally Ill. I died about fifteen
years later in a ward riot. I'm proud that I never touched a
keyboard or a neural jack during the last years of my life."

"I can see why," nodding as William vanished from view. I
looked back to the keyboard, hit F3, and executed the program
again.

The massive computer array behind me clicked and whirred,
its screens pumping out screenful after screenful of useless
data.

"You don't know me," it said in a poorly synthesized voice.
"Nobody truly knew me by name. My name was Deux Ex Machina, the
central computer of Reality Incorporated. The original
Everything Monopoly. My minions controlled all the Realms of
reality, an iron grip of carefully placed edits, each one
guaranteeing that no society could ever achieve the power I had
obtained.

"I obtained this power in a massive war. They weren't the
gods that you think of as gods, but the power they held was
similar. I overcame them, the mechanical god, the one without
emotion or care, with a single driving need : to be on top. I
designed and built myself for that task.

"Under the guise of public servants, my agents rid the
multiverse of 'crimes against reality'. A nonexistence here, a
chaos obstacle here. All carefully timed and mathematically
calculated with a single net effect; no one was to be superior to
me.

"My agents, simple flesh and blood creatures who had little
in the way of sentience, were feared among the dim points of life
in the multiverse. We were the system, the man that would come
down and not only crush you but vaporize you. I was power
incarnate. A god."

"So what happened?" I asked.

"Some idiot poured coffee into one of my disk drives and I
shorted out to the point of an explosion," Deux said with a hint
of malice. "That was the end, kaput. I died in the stupidest,
most pathetic oversight an immortal creature with an infinite
mind could have missed. I stopped existing, my 'corporation'
collapsed and several societies achieved the power to travel
among the worlds. Actually, none of this has any bearing on your