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

positive end of the meter I was doing fine. I found my little
brother, HelpBeta, who had gotten lost somewhere along my strange
long journey."

"And your fiancee?" I asked.

"S'occter," Help nodded solemnly. "That's another matter.
He died saving me."

"Eh?"

"There was this maniac named Tyrell," Help said. "Me and a
friend of mine called Nostalgia Man--"

"Howdy," Nosty waved from behind Help, snapping a quick shot
of John with his Polaroid.

"--we managed to banish him to some empty world," Help said.
"S'occter landed there while on his travelling monk quest to make
the people of the universe happy, and unfortunately bumped into
Tyrell. He didn't know who the man was, of course, but he gave
the man a lift anyway. Somehow the topic of me came up in
conversation. There was a fight, a struggle for the controls of
S'occter's shuttle... naturally, the self destruct button was in
plain view. They bumped it."

"Yow."

"It's okay," S'occter shrugged. "I got the bastard in the
end, and I was at the end of my mission anyway. I saved my
wife's bacon, too. It would have been nice to see Help once
more, but we all see each other at the end of the tour anyhow, so
there's no loss. When everything's repeated itself, and life is
boring, and there's nowhere to go but out, time has no meaning
and everybody'll be there to welcome you at the door."

The two left, and I turned back to the keys, firing up the
program again. My WPM made my fingers blur; they knew what to
do.

"I was the first of a breed," Number Two said, having a seat
on a nearby seat and resting his hands on his umbrella cane.
"The first AI ever developed. I was developed in conjunction
with the VOS project, an attempt not only to simulate reality so
well that you couldn't tell the difference, but to simulate
PEOPLE so well you couldn't tell the difference.

"It worked in both extents. The AI code was amazing, almost
magical in nature. Qwerty, the scientist who developed it, was
astonished at how well he worked, but he never stopped to ask why