Once More With Footnotes

rollafloor so they go hiking through the Venusian jungles or whatever in a room eight feet square and fall out the window. And afers have burned alive and turned into couch crisps. You've seen it all on the box. At least, you have if you're not an afer. They don't watch much.
     
                  Odd, really. Government is against it. Well, it's a drug. One you can't tax. And they say, freedom is the birthright of every individual, but you start being free, they get upset. Coppers seem to be offended, too. But ... well. Take rape. I mean, you don't hear about it these days. Not when you can pick up Dark Alley Cruiser down the rental shop. Not that I've watched it, you understand, but I'm told the girl's very good, doe s all that's expected of her, which you don't have to be an Eisenstein to work out isn't what it'd be like for real, if you catch my drift. And there's other stuff, I won't even mention the titles. I don't need to, do I? It's not all remakes of Rambo XXIV with you in the title role is what I mean.
     
                  I reckon what the coppers don't like is there's all this crime going on in your head and they can't touch you for it.
     
                  There's all that stuff on the TV about how it corrupts people. All these earnest professors sitting round in leather chairs — of course they never use their machines for anything except the nature programmes or high-toned stuff like Madam Ovary. Probably does corrupt people but, I don't know, everything's been corrupting people since the, you know , dawn of thingy, but with afers it stays inside. They aren't about to go and knock over some thin little girl in cotton underwear coming back from the all-night chippy, not after Dark Alley Cruiser. Probably can't, anyway. And it's cheap so you don't have to steal for it. A lot of them forget to feed themselves. Afers are the kind of problems that come with the solutions built in.
     
                  I like a good book, me.
     
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                  They watched me very hard when I checked the gas-feed controls. The add-on stuff was pretty good . You could see where it was hooked into everything else. I bet if I had time to really run over it on the bench you'd find he had a little daydream every day. Probably didn't even properly come out from under. Funny thing, that, about artificial realitie s . You know how you can be dreaming and the buzzer goes and the dream sort of incorporates the buzzer into the plot? Probably it was like that.
     
                  It had been well-maintained. Cleaned regularly and everything. You can get into trouble otherwise, you get buil d-ups of gunk on connectors and things. That's why all my customers, I tell them, you take out a little insurance, I'll be round every six months tegular, you can give me the key, I've even got a bypass box so if you're, you know, busy I can do a quick ser vice and be away and you won't know I've been. This is personal service. They trust me.
     
                  I switched off the power to the alarms, cleaned a few boards for the look of it, reseated everything, switched it back on. Et wolla.
     
                  The copper leaned over my shoul der.
     
                  "How did you do that?" he said.
     
                  "Well," I said, "there was no negative bias voltage on the sub-logic multiplexer," which shut him up.
     
                  Thing is, there wasn't anything wrong. It wasn't that I couldn't find a fault, there was nothing to say that a fault existed. It was as if it'd just been told to shut down everything. Including him.
     
                  Valve stuck ... that meant too much nitrous oxide. The scene of crime people prob'ly had to get the smile off his face with a crowbar.
     
                  The lights came on, there wer e all the little whirs and gurgles you get when these things boot up, the memory sinks started to hum, we were cooking with gas.
     
                  They got excited about all this.
     
                  And then, of course, I had to get out my own helmet.
     
                  Viruses, that's the thing. Started off as a joke. Some kid'd hack into someone else's reality, scrawl messages on the walls. A joke, like the McLints. Only, instead of scrambling the wage bill or wiping out English literature, you turned their brain to