Once More With Footnotes

isn't like being alive, but perhaps it isn't like being dead.
     
                  I've got photos of both of them. Went through old back issues of the Seagem house magazine, they were both at some l ong-service presentation. She was quite good-looking. You could tell they liked one another.
     
                  Makes sense they'll look just like that now. Every time I switch a visor on, I wonder if I'll spot them. Wouldn't mind knowing how they did it, might like to be a virus myself one day, could be an expert at it.
     
                  He owes me, anyway. I got the machine going again and I never told them what she said to me, when I saw her in his reality. She said, "Tell him to hurry."
     
                  Romantic, really. Like that play ... what was i t ... with the good dance numbers, supposed to be in New York. Oh, yeah. Romeo and Juliet. People in machines, I can live with that.
     
                  People say to me, hey, this what the human race meant for? I say, buggered if I know, who knows? We never went back to th e Moon, or that other place, the red one, but we didn't spend the money down here on Earth either. So people just curl up and live inside their heads. Until now, anyway.
     
                  They could be anywhere. Of course, it's not like life but prob'ly it isn't death eit her. I wonder what compiler he used? I'd of loved to have had a look at it before he shut the machine down. When I re-booted it, I sort of initialized him and sent him out. Sort of like a godfather, me.
     
                  And anyway, I heard somewhere there's this god, he dreams the whole universe, so is it real or what? Begins with a b. Buddha, I think. Maybe-some other god comes round every six million years to service the machinery.
     
                  But me, I prefer to settle down of an evening with a good book. People don't read books these days. Don't seem to do anything, much. You go down any street, it's all dead, all these people living in their own realities.
     
                  I mean, when I was a kid, we thought the future would be all crowded and cool and rainy with big glowing Japanese adverts everywhere and people eating noodles in the street. At least you'd be communicating, if only to ask the other guy to pass the soy sauce. My joke. But what we got, we got this Information Revolution, what it means is no bugger knows anything and doesn't k n ow they don't know, and they just give up.
     
                  You shouldn't turn in on yourself. It's not what being human means. You got to reach out.
     
                  For example, I'm really enjoying Elements of OSCF Bandpass Design in Computer Generated Environments.
     
                  Man who wrote i t seems to think you can set your S-2030s without isolating your cascade interfaces.
     
                  Try that in the real world and see what happens.
     

I guess we all have our measures of success. Being asked to write this was one of mine. It somehow completed a circle. I now have shelves of editions of Brewer's, new and old, that have been acquired since that first one.
     
    The Rev. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer wanted to tell people things; among his other works were A Guide to Knowledge, a dictionary of miracles and The Readers Handbook of Allusions, References, Plots and Stories. But it's the Phrase and Fable Dictionary that has made him immortal. The book is — well, see below.
     
    I've checked. My copy is still right next to the dictionary. Now read on:
     
     
     
     
     
F oreword: B rewer's D ictionary of P hrase and F able
     
                  I was a Brewer's boy. I first grasped the spine of my second-hand copy when I was twelve. It's still in amazing condition, considering the work I've made it do.
     
                  It was my introduction to mythology and ancient history and a lot more, too, because Brewer's is a serendipitous (see page 1063) book. In other words, you might not find what you're looking for, but you will find three completely unexpected things that are probably more interesting. Reading one item in Brewer's is like eating one peanut. It's practically impossible. There are plenty of other useful books. But you start with Brewer's.
     
                  Nevertheless, the book is hard to describe. You could call it a compendium (I didn't find this