Realtime | Page 3

look on his face. Maggie
recognized the symptoms; he was being paged over his inskin dataweb
link. That was another sign of the gulf that separated her from her son;
the thought of allowing such a thing to be implanted in her skull made
her shudder.
Robert came back to her with a visible shake. "Sorry, Mom. I've got to
go. There's a crisis at the office. Efficiency ratings came in on the half
hour on the web." He grimaced. "We came in almost two percent low.
Looks like some of the staff's been daydreaming when they should
have been working. At least one of the younger women seems to have
been storing interactive fantasies in the office Praxcelis. That would be
bad enough anywhere, but at Praxcelis Corporation itself.... There's
going to be hell to pay." He stooped hurriedly, and kissed his mother on
her cheek. "I'll be back next Saturday; Sunday at the latest. You call me

if you need anything. Anything at all, you hear me?"
Maggie nodded. "Always."
Robert hesitated at the door. "Mom? Don't let them scare you. Praxcelis
is just a machine. You hang tough."
Maggie chuckled, and said again, "Always." She waved a hand at him.
"Go already. Take care of this dangerous criminal who's been storing
fantasies on you."
"'Bye." He was gone.
"Goodbye, Robert," she said to the closed door. Miss Kitty purred
inquiringly. Maggie held the cat up and looked her in the eyes. Miss
Kitty's eyes peered back at her, bright blue and inquisitive. "Don't
worry, Miss Kitty. Computers. Ha."
Realtime:
To be precise; any processing of data that occurs within sufficiently
short duration that the results of the processed data are available in time
to influence or alter the system being monitored or controlled.
On the evening of Sunday, March 14, 2033, Maggie Archer turned on
her fireplace. A switch activated the holograph that simulated a roaring
fire; buried within the holograph, radiant heaters came to life. Maggie
would have preferred real wood, and real fire; but like so much else,
burning wood was illegal. There had been a joke when Maggie was a
little girl; all things that are not mandatory are forbidden.
For Maggie, at least, that phrase was no longer a joke.
There were times when she thought, very seriously, that she had lived
too long. Humanity might not be happy, but it was content. Moving her
rocker near the fire, she settled in, and was soon lost in reverie. It was
hard, sometimes, to trace the exact changes that had led to this joyless,
sterile society, where children aged rather than grew. Oh, things were

always changing, of course, even when she was very young technology
had changed things. But for such a long time the changes had always
seemed for the better. Spaceships, and machinery that polluted less,
better and clearer musical instruments and equipment, a thousand
kitchen and home tools that had made every task infinitely simpler.
She hardly noticed when the timer turned the stereo on, and gentle
strains of Bach drifted through the room.
The change, she was certain, had been the dataweb. In one stroke, the
dataweb had destroyed money, and privacy, and books. It was the loss
of the books that hurt the worst. Nobody had actually taken the books
and burned them, not like in Nazi Germany; they just stopped printing
them. The books died, and were not replaced. Oh, there were collectors,
and private libraries; but the vast majority of the younger generation
had never even seen a real book, much less read one.
The train of thought was an old, familiar friend; nothing new. She rose
after a while, slowly, and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of
tea. While the water boiled she entered the hallway that led to her study.
In the study she turned the lights on; they were incandescents, not
glowpaint. The walls of the study were lined with books, several
thousands of them, all hardbound. The paperbacks, which had once
outnumbered the hardbacks, had disintegrated years ago. Immediately
to the right of the study's door, Maggie turned to face one bookshelf
whose books were in barely readable condition; her favorites, the books
that she re-read most often, and which she read most often to Tia and
Mark.
She pulled down one battered, dilapidated volume. Its leather binding
was dry, and cracked. On the spine of the book, there were flecks of
gold that had once inscribed a title. The absence of the title didn't
bother Maggie; she knew her books. This was The Three Musketeers.
Returning to her living room, she placed the book on the stand next to
her rocker, and finished making her tea. She gathered Miss Kitty to her,
and settled in for the night.

On the