He forgets everything, the girl, the Rude Boy, the Mohawk, them on the stairs, and plunges through the crowd toward the screen. People fall away from him as though they were re-enacting the Red Sea. He dives for the screen, for Bobby, not caring how it must look to anyone. What would they know about it, any of them. He can’t remember in his whole sixteen years ever hearing one person say, I love my friend. Not Bobby, not even himself.
Another story about society’s relationship to technology, and a story about what it means to be human. The unnamed viewpoint character is offered the opportunity to become immortal through digitization, and he refuses. I’m fairly sure I would also refuse, but not for the same reasons. Would sixteen-year-old me have refused?
First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1986. Collected in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, 2010; and The Big Book of Cyberpunk, Vintage, 2023
A Personal Anthology 