The Shockwave Rider Read Online Free PDF

final group to activate the phage that would eliminate all trace of Lazarus, the super-tapeworm compared to which Fluckner’s was negligible, and he was able to stretch and scratch and do all the other things he had to forgo in order not to interrupt the invention of his new self.
    No one below congressional level was entitled to call for a printout of the data stored behind a 4GH. It must have been devised for people with official permission to live other lives than their own. More than once he had been tempted to try to discover just what sort of person his code in theory made him—an FBI operative on undercover assignment, a counter-espionage agent, a White House special representative mopping up the mess his boss had left. … But he had never actually been so foolish. He was like a rat, skulking in the walls of modern society. The moment he showed his nose, the exterminators would be sent for.
     
    He dressed in the wrong clothes and collected what he felt he need not leave behind, a single bagful of oddments like transferable Delphi tickets and his new copper ingot. He also pocketed two inhalers of tranquilizer, which he knew he would require before the day was out.
    Finally he set a bomb under his desk and wired it to the phone so that he could trigger it whenever he chose.
    The destruction of the church might figure in the media’s daily crime list—murders so many, robberies so many, rapes so many—but quite often they didn’t get down as far as arson because there wasn’t time. That, so long as nobody filed a claim for insurance money, would be that. With ready-made suspects at hand in the shape of the Grailers and the Billykings, the harried local police would be content to treat the case as open and shut.
    He gave one final glance around as he prepared to quit the plastic dome for the last time. Traffic hummed on the highway, but there was nobody in sight who might have paid special attention to him. In some ways, he reflected, this was a much less complex century to live in than the twentieth must have been.
    If only it were as simple as it looked.
     
    THE NUMBER YOU HAVE REACHED
     
    Back when it was still TV and not three-vee, a famous, crusty, cynical historian named Angus Porter, who had survived long enough to become a Grand Old Man and whose lifelong leftist views were in consequence now tolerated as forgivable eccentricity, had put the matter in a nutshell.
    Or, as some would-be wit promptly said, in a nut case.
    Invited to comment on the world nuclear disarmament treaty of 1989, he said, “This is the third stage of human social evolution. First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we’re going to have the brain race.
    “And, if we’re lucky, the final stage will be the human race.”
     
    THE PERSONIFICATION OF A TALENT
     
    “So that’s how he managed it!” Hartz said, marveling. He stared at the shaven body in the steel chair as though he had never seen this man before. “I’d never have believed it possible to punch a whole new identity into the net from a domestic phone—certainly not without the help of a computer larger than he owned.”
    “It’s a talent,” Freeman said, surveying the screens and lights on his console. “Compare it to the ability of a pianist, if you like. Back before tape, there were soloists who could carry twenty concerti in their heads, note-perfect, and could improvise for an hour on a four-note theme. That’s disappeared, much as poets no longer recite by the thousand lines the way they apparently could in Homer’s day. But it’s not especially remarkable.”
    Hartz said after a moment, “Know something? I’ve seen a good few disturbing things, here at Tarnover, and been told about a great many more. But I don’t think anything has …” He had to force himself to utter the next words, but with a valiant effort he made the confession. “So frightened me as hearing you say that.”
    “I’m not sure I follow you.”
    “Why,