Futures : A hypertext short story

5B5: Penetration

This is going to be a real pleasure, Michael Darnby told himself.
   He began to scrape the loose mound of blue paper into a wad to make counting it easier. The limp notes refused to pack together into a neat rectangle. Puzzled, he took hold of one of the fivers and tried to lift it off the heap. Another note came with it; and another; and another. The whole pile rose, joined and sagging like an ill-made, expanding Christmas decoration.
   Using both hands, he explored one of the joins and discovered that the notes were not stuck together as if glued. They were interwoven. Parts of one note intersected others. In places, one solid piece of paper had formed an X shape by passing through another solid sheet of paper.
   Crazy as it seemed, the notes had to have gathered at the Output Gate of the psionic amplifier in a ghost-like condition and they had embraced their neighbours while solidifying.
   Darnby lifted the mass all the way into the air. A much newer note hung from the lowest point of the tangle, attached only by a corner. Three creases in it told him that he had found the Ł5 note that he had placed across the Comparator Gate.
   Well, what do I do with this lot? he asked himself. Disgusted, he rested his chin on his fists and contemplated a fair but unspendable fortune.
   Maybe I can cut them apart, he thought at last. And leave only a set of narrow slits in the notes. If I stick them up with a bit of Sellotape, no one will ever suspect there's a little bit missing. Or maybe I can get more than the face value of the notes by selling the whole mess as a work of art; or a scientific curiosity. I bet the professor of physics at the university would by fascinated by a genuine impossibility like this.
   Whatever, there's nothing much I can do before breakfast, he decided. Perhaps I should pin the amplifier to the wall next time, so the trawled money solidifies before it hits the floor and saves me the bother of cutting and sticking it back together again.
   The edge of excitement blunted for the moment, Darnby pushed away from the table. It was time to put the kettle one and do something about his internal rumblings. Making fried-egg sandwich sounded a good idea.

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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