this damn cave? Well, I’ve got to, sooner or later. I can’t go back down through the Valley of Sereness, and there’s nothing farther up this mountain. But let’s not just leap in here. Eyes burning, shoulders rigid, he typed: Do I still have my Sword of Fire and Ice?
Yes.
I thrust it into the cave entrance, slicing up and down from top to bottom, and also from side to side.
Iron arrows shoot from concealed tubes on both sides of the entrance. Hitting nothing but the opposite wall, they fall to the ground.
Aha, Wally thought, just what I figured. Okay, Ogre, here I come. Enter
Bzzzzzztt. Doorbell. Drat. Is it that late? Leaving Princess Labia to twist slowly slowly in the lair, Wally ran his fingers like a trained–dog act in fast forward over the keyboard, changing the menu, bringing up the current Eastern Daylight Time — 15:30 — and his appointment book for today, which was blank except for the notation: 15:30 — Andy Kelp and his friend to view the reservoir. Oh, well, that could be fun, too.
Lifting his hands from the keyboard, withdrawing his eyes from the video display, pushing his swivel chair back from the system desk, and getting to his feet, Wally felt the usual aches all through his shoulders and neck and lower back. The pains of battle, of intense concentration for hours at a time, of occasional victory and sudden crushing defeat, were familiar to him, and he bore them without complaint; in fact, with a kind of quiet pride. He could stand up to it.
At twenty–four, Wally Knurr was well on his way to becoming a character in one of his own interactive fictions. (He wrote them as well as consuming them, and so far had sold two of his creations: Mist Maidens of Morg to Astral Rainbow Productions, Mill Valley, California; and Centaur! to Futurogical Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts.) A round soft creature as milky white as vanilla yogurt, Wally was four feet six inches tall and weighed 285 pounds, very little of it muscle. His eagerly melting eyes, like blue–yolked soft–boiled eggs, blinked trustingly through thick spectacles, and the only other bit of color about him was the moist red of his far–too–generous mouth. While his brain was without doubt a wonderful contrivance, even more wonderful than the several computer systems filling this living room, its case was not top quality.
From infancy, Wally Knurr had known his physical appearance was outside the usual spectrum of facades found acceptable by the majority of people. Most of us can find some corner of the planet where our visages fit more or less compatibly with the local array of humankind, but for Wally the only faint hope was space travel; perhaps elsewhere in the solar system he would find short, fat, moist creatures like himself. In the meantime, his was a life of solitude, as though he’d been marooned on Earth rather than born here. Most people looked at him, thought, “funny–looking,” and went on about their business.
It was while doing a part–time stint as a salesman in the electronics department at Macy’s as a Christmas season extra four years ago that Wally had at last found his great love and personal salvation: the personal computer. You could play games on it. You could play math games on it. You could talk to it, and it would talk back. It was a friend you could plug in, and it would stay at home with you. You could do serious things with it and frivolous things with it. You could store and retrieve, you could compose music, commit architectural renderings, and balance your checkbook. You could desktop publish. Through the wonders of interactive fiction, you could take part in pulp stories. To Wally, the personal computer became the universe, and he was that universe’s life form. And in there, he didn’t look funny.
At the New School, where Wally had once taken a basic course in computers, he now sometimes taught a more advanced course in the same thing, and it was in that course he first
Yes.
I thrust it into the cave entrance, slicing up and down from top to bottom, and also from side to side.
Iron arrows shoot from concealed tubes on both sides of the entrance. Hitting nothing but the opposite wall, they fall to the ground.
Aha, Wally thought, just what I figured. Okay, Ogre, here I come. Enter
Bzzzzzztt. Doorbell. Drat. Is it that late? Leaving Princess Labia to twist slowly slowly in the lair, Wally ran his fingers like a trained–dog act in fast forward over the keyboard, changing the menu, bringing up the current Eastern Daylight Time — 15:30 — and his appointment book for today, which was blank except for the notation: 15:30 — Andy Kelp and his friend to view the reservoir. Oh, well, that could be fun, too.
Lifting his hands from the keyboard, withdrawing his eyes from the video display, pushing his swivel chair back from the system desk, and getting to his feet, Wally felt the usual aches all through his shoulders and neck and lower back. The pains of battle, of intense concentration for hours at a time, of occasional victory and sudden crushing defeat, were familiar to him, and he bore them without complaint; in fact, with a kind of quiet pride. He could stand up to it.
At twenty–four, Wally Knurr was well on his way to becoming a character in one of his own interactive fictions. (He wrote them as well as consuming them, and so far had sold two of his creations: Mist Maidens of Morg to Astral Rainbow Productions, Mill Valley, California; and Centaur! to Futurogical Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts.) A round soft creature as milky white as vanilla yogurt, Wally was four feet six inches tall and weighed 285 pounds, very little of it muscle. His eagerly melting eyes, like blue–yolked soft–boiled eggs, blinked trustingly through thick spectacles, and the only other bit of color about him was the moist red of his far–too–generous mouth. While his brain was without doubt a wonderful contrivance, even more wonderful than the several computer systems filling this living room, its case was not top quality.
From infancy, Wally Knurr had known his physical appearance was outside the usual spectrum of facades found acceptable by the majority of people. Most of us can find some corner of the planet where our visages fit more or less compatibly with the local array of humankind, but for Wally the only faint hope was space travel; perhaps elsewhere in the solar system he would find short, fat, moist creatures like himself. In the meantime, his was a life of solitude, as though he’d been marooned on Earth rather than born here. Most people looked at him, thought, “funny–looking,” and went on about their business.
It was while doing a part–time stint as a salesman in the electronics department at Macy’s as a Christmas season extra four years ago that Wally had at last found his great love and personal salvation: the personal computer. You could play games on it. You could play math games on it. You could talk to it, and it would talk back. It was a friend you could plug in, and it would stay at home with you. You could do serious things with it and frivolous things with it. You could store and retrieve, you could compose music, commit architectural renderings, and balance your checkbook. You could desktop publish. Through the wonders of interactive fiction, you could take part in pulp stories. To Wally, the personal computer became the universe, and he was that universe’s life form. And in there, he didn’t look funny.
At the New School, where Wally had once taken a basic course in computers, he now sometimes taught a more advanced course in the same thing, and it was in that course he first
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