Free The Bringer of Light by Pat Black Page B

flicks?”
    “What?”
    “Flicks? For likes?”
    “I have no idea what you’re saying.” Cutwater packed away the empty tin. “You do speak awfully well for someone your age, though.”
    She beamed. “I learned. I viddied your speech.”
    “That’s nice. Well. I’m going to get moving now. You sure your heat shield is going to make it through these temperatures?”
    “Mega reckoned.”
    “I hope so. Because I’ve got some statistics for you. In 40 years, not one Unix unit has made it to Tegrut.”
    The girl’s face flickered. “Reckoned. But the 461 is the stars model. Seoul style. I’ll be there. No tears.”
    “I hope you’re right. If you falter, you’ve got nothing to save you from the cold. I can’t carry you. And you do know there are other things living up here besides the people of Tegrut?”
    She brightened up. “Oh, hi-fi! Monsters, hey?”
    “As far as you’re concerned, yes.”
    “When do we set off?”
    “Now. Incidentally – you got a name?”
    She beamed. “Joon.”
    “June.” He nodded. “Seems a long way from June out here.”
    Her mouth twitched. “No, not June. Joon .”
    Cutwater laughed, spreading his mittened hands over the dying fire. When it was no more than embers, he got up and gathered his gear, face cast in shadow. Perched on her heat sled, she watched, features shifting rapidly, as he put on his hat, fixed his goggles and set off straight into the wind. He trudged through the snow, heavy walking stick in hand, body angled against the maelstrom. In the distance, the mountain loomed, a giant with armour of ice and black stone.
    Light as a bubble, Joon’s pedestal floated free of the outcrop and followed Cutwater’s deep footprints at a slight distance.
     
                                                  **************
     
     
    (Reckoned from the long-play Filie, The Hornet’s Nest, by Albert F Golding)
     
    The quantum event, as is so often the case with new technology, was as a result of sex. Actual physical bump.
    Or rather, the lack of it.
    It was traced to one incident in particular, the humiliation and subsequent revenge of one man, William Dutton, subsequently known by an internet handle, Sexface.
    Sexface was a typical middle-aged, middle class man, with a wife and two children who worked as a newspaper – *search opened* an ancient type of bogrolled screed of newsies and viddies *search ends* He was commissioned to write a travel newsie in rural Froggyland, with a fellow party of journalists. This was seen as a treat for people in Dutton’s location, but the incident had repercussions that would be felt across the world.
    Taken to a plush, renovated hotel deep in the Froggy countryside outside Paris, Dutton was wined, dined and feted by a travel company seeking to drum up business through the newspapers and other media outlets. It seems that Sexface had a good time, but for some reason he drew the ire of one other member of his party. Ironically, although this person’s hacking work as part of the Hornet collective changed the world, their name has been forgotten by history, while Sexface’s is immortal and sploogy.
    Sexface took to his room in the hotel, and took a perve at viddies of bump, which were then well reckoned. Trad then was for viddie-watchers to then self-chuck. But, bump was confined to the outer world in those days and there was great embarrassment among people like Sexface for mostways across the world to be caught self-chucking.
                  What the hacker had done was to patch into Sexface’s pre-Unix hand unit (a laptop) and broadcast his bump to the world through the old internet system. This was not quite the first synchro-bump, but it soon became the most famous owing to the sexface William Dutton showed to the rest of the internet.
    Sexface underwent socialaggeddon; his wife and children left him, he lost his job, and he was soon world famous owing to his embryonic