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There were some people in whom weakness, once it had appeared, grew like a cancer.
“Go down.” It seemed obvious. “You have to go down before you can come out—that’s how these things always work.” “Ah.” !Xabbu turned toward her, a sudden smile stretching his simulated face. “Such wisdom is not easily come by, Renie. I am impressed.” She stared at him for a moment. She had been talking about the endless dungeon games she had played as a netgirl, but she wasn’t quite sure what he meant.
“But often I think that people believe things which can be measured are true things, and things which cannot be measured are untrue things. What I read of science makes it even more sad, for that is what people point to as a ‘truth,’ yet science itself seems to say that all we can hope to find are patterns in things. But if that is true, why is one way of explaining a pattern worse than others?
“In any case, the old-fashioned part is that a lot of these people were engineers and hackers and early users of the net, and they had an idea back then that the communications network spreading across the world was going to be a free and open place, somewhere that money and power didn’t matter. No one would censor anyone else, and no one would be forced into conforming with what some corporation wanted.”
“What happened?” “About what you’d expect. It was a naive idea, probably—money has a way of changing things. People started to make more and more rules, and the net began to look like the rest of the so-called civilized world.”
The day had already been hideously long, she had been suspended from her job, and her father had complained when she had phoned to say she’d be home late and he’d have to make his own supper—in fact, he had seemed more upset about that than the news about Stephen or her job.
Orlando wondered briefly if there was something bad for your brain about having years-long friendships with people you’d never met in the real world.
He had thought once that it was strange to have a friend you’d never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you’d never really had.
There ought to be some way to tell when you were doing something for the last time so you could appreciate it.
