Futures : A hypertext short story

5B2: Doubt

Michael Darnby lifted a limp sheet of paper off the mound, placed it on an area of table about a foot from the psionic amplifier and said: "One!" in a clear, ringing tone. He reached slowly for another fiver.
   "Eighty-nine!" he said as he added the last note to a neat pile. He had drawn out the counting of his trawled treasure in a disgustingly self-satisfied fashion. He was Ł445 richer that morning.
   I wonder if they're real? he thought suddenly.
   Doubt bobbed to the surface of his mind like a cork released from the bottom of a tank of water. The fivers certainly looked and felt real enough. But what if the notes were just an illusion? A spot of wishful thinking? Hallucinations can seem solid and portable, indistinguishable from reality if they are strong enough. Sometimes, a belief can be taken dangerously too far.
   What if I try and buy something with money only I can see? Darnby asked himself. There I'd be, standing in a shop, holding out an empty hand. And everyone else would be wondering if it was a joke or the ravings of some dangerous lunatic.
   This boy's a fool, he told himself. Of course, the cash is real.
   But the problem continued to worry him. He felt an irrational need to prove the existence or non-existence of his trawled treasure. All he had to do was solve the following problem: how does someone who may be hallucinating find out if a non-hallucinating observer can see a whole bunch of money without putting himself into a potentially embarrassing position?
   Darnby pushed away from the table to put the kettle on. There was no need to starve to death just because his screws might, or might not, be slightly loose. When he had two slices of bread steaming nicely under the grill, he took a mug down from the rack and opened the fridge door. As he was pouring milk into the mug, ready to receive tea, the solution came to him.
   His every-other-daily pinta arrived at about a quarter to eight during the week. But on Saturday, with money to collect, the milkman called about an hour later. As Michael Darnby didn't usually drag himself out of bed before ten on a Saturday morning, he had trained the milkman to look for the money hidden under an empty bottle, and to leave any change under a full one.
   All he had to do was put one of his doubtful notes under the bottle - the bottle on the draining board that he had forgotten to put out the previous night. If the Ł5 note really existed, the milkman wouldn't ring the bell in search of payment and Michael Darnby would be as rich as he imagined himself to be. At that point, a smell of charring bread invited him to suspend his line of thought and turn his toast over.
   Armed with a mug of tea and a plate of marmaladed toast, he returned to the dining table. He found himself strangely reluctant to touch his windfall in case the neat stack of rather ancient notes popped into oblivion like time-expired soap bubbles. His eyes focussed on the clock on the mantlepiece.
   The milkman! he thought. He'll be here anytime now.
   He collected the milk bottle from the draining board and hurried to the front door. An endless period of waiting followed. As a watched kettle never boils, an expected tradesman never arrives. Eventually, he heard glassy rattlings at the front door. Michael Darnby held his breath. The bell remained silent.
   Darnby sneaked to the front door a few minutes later. There was a full bottle of milk beside the outside doormat. And under that milk bottle... His change!
   The psionically trawled money was real! His ridiculous doubts had been the products of an over-active imagination. It was a beautiful day and he was rich! Feeling weak with joy, he floated back to the living room, to his cooling second cup of tea and the first instalment of a free fortune.

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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