Futures : A hypertext short story

5C1: Attraction

Had he bothered to investigate the source of the plinking noise, Michael Darnby would not have been so eager to continue his psionic treasure trawling.
   There were two more slots in the window; in other panes, having exactly the same dimensions but inclined at a slightly steeper angle to the vertical than the original slot.
   There were also new slots, each measuring one-eighth by one and a quarter inches, in the walls and ceiling, just like another slot, which had been formed the previous night but had remained unnoticed.
   The police officers, who broke into the house the next morning, reported that the place looked as if it had been machine-gunned with fifty-pence pieces. They found over two hundred of them scattered across a circuit diagram on the dining table, lying in front of the riddled corpse of a man in headphones that weren't plugged in.
   The police found slots large enough to admit a fifty-pence piece cutting right through the structure of the house. Impossible as it seemed, the coins had passed cleanly through external and internal walls, windows and the roof on their way to the dining table. The paths of six of the coins had taken them through the head and upper body of the late Michael Darnby.
   Later, as they were measuring and making diagrams of the flight paths of the fifty-pence pieces, the eyes of two of the members of the forensic team met.
   One grinned. The other responded with a slight shrug. Both knew that they were wasting their time, merely going through the motions of routine. This particular mystery was likely to remained baffling and unsolved.

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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