Before They Were Giants Read Online Free PDF

hatch for the failed fiction writer—journalism—is scrambling for survival itself. And the economy has no jobs for unskilled labor.
     
    We need someone to reinvent the publishing industry for the Internet, we need a visionary to bring us the fabled New Business Model—that is, we need some rapacious fat bastard in a suit to figure out some bulletproof way to exploit us. My sincere advice to would-be writers today is exactly the advice I ignored myself 35 years ago: keep your day job. It took America nearly a decade to notice how incredibly boring reality TV was—and it still hasn’t noticed how astonishingly boring talent-contest TV is—so it’s going to take it a long time to notice how unbelievably boring all those blogs and twitters and amateur YouTubers are, and turn to professional storytellers again. When they do they’ll probably want graphic novels.
     
    For now, try something with more career potential. Like folk music, or modern dance, or experimental theater. It’s no accident that my home has always been known as Tottering-on-the-Brink.
     
    <>
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Fragments of a Hologram Rose
    by William Gibson
     
     
    T
    hat summer Parker had trouble sleeping.
     
    There were power droughts; sudden failures of the delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to consciousness.
     
    To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature alligator clips, and black tape to wire the inducer to a battery-operated ASP-deck. Power loss in the inducer would trigger the deck’s playback circuit.
     
    He brought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sole purpose of taking a nap and his morning’s exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette’s transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn’t been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible.
     
    He had been able to sit through the whole thing only once, though by now he knew every sensation of the first five subjective minutes. He thought the most interesting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at the start of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift glance down the white beach that picked out the figure of a guard patrolling a chain-link fence, a black machine pistol slung over his arm.
     
    While Parker slept, power drained from the city’s grids.
     
    The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a dark implosion into other flesh. Familiarity cushioned the shock. He felt the cool sand under his shoulders. The cuffs of his tattered jeans flapped against his bare ankles in the morning breeze. Soon the boy would wake fully and begin his Ardha-Matsyendra-something; with other hands Parker groped in darkness for the ASP deck.
     
    Three in the morning.
     
    Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
     
    Morning’s recorded dream, fading: through other eyes, dark plume of a Cuban freighter—fading with the horizon it navigates across the mind’s gray screen.
     
    Three in the morning.
     
    Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat schematic images. What you said—what she said—watching her pack—dialing the cab. However you shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hieroglyphs converging on a central component: you, standing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.
     
    The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss. The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay twice the fare. She had three pieces of luggage. In his respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He pedaled away in the rain. She didn’t look back.
     
    The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you the finger.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas