Futures : A hypertext short story

3A: Burial

This isn't the sort of thing a sensible person leaves lying around, Darnby told himself. If anyone else sees it, they'll start casting doubt on my sanity.
   He tucked the diagram away in a handy cupboard, in the middle of a pile of old magazines, which had remained undisturbed for longer than he could remember.
   About six months later, he decided to have one of his periodic clear-outs. Strict rules governed such occasions. Anything that he had not used since the last clear-out, anything that seemed unlikely to be needed again in the immediate future, had to go. The magazines were an exception to the rule. He was hoping that they would acquire scarcity value eventually and that he would be able to sell them for an unreasonable price to a collector sometime in the future. It was an unreasonable sort of dream, but everyone should be allowed at least one such ambition.
   While sorting through the pile, arranging the magazines in date order and looking for gaps in the sequence, he came across a circuit diagram. He puzzled over it for a while. It had no title and there was nothing to explain what the circuit did. He had not even bothered to add values for resistance and capacitance beside the components, or the code numbers of the transistors.
   With a shrug, he crumpled the sheet of graph paper and threw it into the fire. Whatever it was, the circuit diagram was clearly redundant, and probably duplicated elsewhere in a more intelligible form. He assumed that it was some gadget that sounded essential on paper but which he had decided against building after proper thought.

END of this route through the story.

In Conclusion

I wrote this short story in September of 1980, before the computer technology needed to create a hypertext story was available to the home user.

Fifteen years later, in September of 1995, there were much fancier hypertext programs on the market than the one which I wrote [using QBasic 4.5, for anyone interested in that sort of thing] to display the hypertext version of the story, but what really counts is the content of the story, not how it looks, and the author chosing to make the effort to go all the way with his vision.

The story is featured in the second volume of my collected short stories [first edition 1997] and this HTML version was created in January, 2000.

This is the end.

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