Open Sesame Read Online Free PDF

with Yek and Eepeepeep. A tiny part of its brain remembers that for a short while things were somehow different, but not for very long.
    ‘How very aggravating,’ says Ali Baba. ‘Oh well, never mind. Goes to show the danger of counting your thieves before they’re boiled. And afterwards, too,’ he adds uncertainly. ‘Come on, let’s have a nice cup of tea before we take this lot to the tip.’
    The story has changed.
    Yes; up to a point. The sea changes when you throw a rock into it; a hole appears where a moment ago there was water. It doesn’t stay that way for very long, however. A very large quantity of water has an unsettling knack of usually having the last word, and stories aren’t much better about admitting defeat.
    About this time, in Ali Baba’s courtyard, there should be twelve-foot-high invisible letters spelling out THE END, followed by the names of the assistant producer, cameraman and chief lighting engineer. Instead, there are smaller letters, and they say:
    Temporary interference; please do not adjust your set
    while the severed tendrils of plot lash out wildly, as the continuity spiders throw out gossamer lines to make it fast to the nearest convenient anchoring-point. A loose story is a deadly thing; all sorts of flies that usually wouldn’t have to worry about it are suddenly at risk.
    And there’s worse.
    The story is angry.

CHAPTER THREE
    Whatever prompted her to put on Aunt Fatty’s ring, it wasn’t vanity. It encircled her finger like the tab from a Coke can, and was marginally less comfortable. It kept hitting the keyboard as she typed, bringing strange symbols up out of the depths of the WP; peculiar sigils and runes, the sort of thing that even software writers generally only see in their sleep, after a midnight snack of Canadian cheddar. To make matters worse, they proved singularly hard to delete. One of them, a weird little design that looked uncommonly like two very amorous snakes, had to be chased all round the screen with the cursor, and when Michelle finally backed it into a corner between two windows, it took three point-blank bursts from the delete key to finish it off. Even then, she had the unpleasant feeling that it was still there, hiding in the lost files and watching her.
    Having killed it as best she could, she leaned back in her exquisitely uncomfortable health-and-safety-approved ergonomic WP operator’s chair (they use a similar model, virtually identical except for added electrodes, in some of the more conservative American states) and stared out of the window. In the tiny crack between the two neighbouring office blocks, she could see a flat blue thing which an as yet unsuppressed sliver of memory told her was the Sky. Hello sky, she thought.
    ‘Christ,’ she muttered to herself. ‘What am I doing here?’
    Bleep. Bleep-bleep. The red light which served as the machine’s answer to the cartoonist’s thought-bubble with an axe in a log of wood in it flashed twice. Bleep.
    ‘What you should be doing,’ said the machine, ‘is getting on with inputting the East Midlands averages.’
    Michelle blinked. Someone had spoken; someone, furthermore, who was either a Dalek {Legal & Equitable Life pic is an equal opportunities employer with a policy of positive discrimination in favour of minority ethnic and cultural minorities; L&E press release, 15/5/97), a heavy smoker or being silly. She looked round. At the next work-station, Sharon was locked in symbiotic communion with her machine. On the other side of her, Claire’s chair was empty; a sure sign the fleet was in. Claire seemed to catch things off transatlantic container ships; most spectacularly Johannes, a six-foot-four Dutchman with the biggest ears Michelle had ever seen on a two-legged life form.
    Curious. Maybe they’d fitted voice-boxes to the machines without telling anybody; unlikely, since such gadgets cost money, and L&E, like most insurance companies, objected to parting with money under any