James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

It wasn’t a good life, most of the time. Felix’s wounds never healed, and neither did most other people’s. There were lingering sicknesses and sudden ones. Tragedy on tragedy.

But Felix liked his data-center. There in the humming of the racks, he never felt like it was the first days of a better nation, but he never felt like it was the last days of one, either.

> go to bed, felix

> soon, kong, soon — almost got this backup running

> youre a junkie, dude.

> look whos talking

He reloaded the Google homepage. Queen Kong had had it online for a couple years now. The Os in Google changed all the time, whenever she got the urge. Today they were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other frowning.

He looked at it for a long time and dropped back into a terminal to check his backup. It was running clean, for a change. The little government’s records were safe.

> ok night night

> take care

Van waved at him as he creaked to the door, stretching out his back with a long series of pops.

“Sleep well, boss,” he said.

“Don’t stick around here all night again,” Felix said. “You need your sleep, too.”

“You’re too good to us grunts,” Van said, and went back to typing.

Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?

It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.

“I think one of the things that I see when I look back at my earlier work is a struggle to recognize and accept that the heart is the master and the head is the servant, and that that is always the case, except when it isn’t the case we’re in deep, deep trouble. That’s the way it looks to me now when I look back on it, but I wasn’t able to articulate that twenty years ago.”

— William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories

The term “postcyberpunk” was first used by writer Lawrence Person, in an essay titled “Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto” published in the critical magazine Nova Express in 1998. Person’s essay points toward some of the same developments we are pursuing in this anthology, but we do not use the term in exactly the same way that he sets it forth. As we go to press, Person’s essay is still available at the URL http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/08/2123255.shtml.