From: az.sandhawk@gmail.com   
      
   He finally made it back.   
      
   It wasn't like he remembered it. There were no Plissken look-a-likes eyeing   
   him from the corner, hands on their sidearms. The Russians weren't there   
   anymore - no longer caught between the hammer and the sickle, they made their   
   escape long ago. Now they    
   come and go as the please...Somewhere else, obviously.   
      
   The place was abandoned. It looked like most of the equipment was probably   
   still there - too heavy and obsolete by today's standards.    
      
   But the pile of it left on the outside - mostly first gen and homegrown   
   telecom antenna components - stood out like some sort of monument to a long   
   past dream of the future. One that had anticipated much of what he was living   
   and experiencing but that    
   had also ended up being different.   
      
   He had believed in the democratization of all of this. Had welcomed having   
   that space to come and share a drink and a laugh with the rest of "his kind,"   
   whatever he thought that meant at the time. But after the crowds had   
   descended, trashed the place and    
   stolen anything not nailed down and worth pawning off as their own....which he   
   would have approved of, okay, he's not a moralist, he would be the first to   
   say so...And something he might have done once or twice in his time....   
      
   It was the theft of the ideas he objected to...That blatant disregard for the   
   history of the shit they had just jacked. He wasn't stupid enough to tell you   
   that he alone invented that algorithm he had jacked- he might be good enough   
   to know what to steal    
   but he had respect. And courtesy...Enough to stick around for a little bit   
   anyway. Those who stole all this shit couldn't explain it. They just leveraged   
   it, never learning what it meant or the sacrifices that went into making it   
   all possible...How *hard*   
    it was to figure it all out without the planet sized architectures every   
   scriptkid in Brazil uses nowadays. He chuckled out loud. He would like to see   
   a 15 year old try going online with a 6502 today.   
      
   But now this was all that was left - the wind shifted and the door followed   
   suit, he heard the hinges squeal a little...Like some sad kitten saying hello.   
      
   He winced and stepped inside. It was empty. He trod quietly through the dust.   
   The old CD jukebox was still in its place. On a whim, he reached down and   
   plugged it in. There was a pause as the machine came to life.   
      
   As if it hadn't missed a beat, the machine spun up a CD and he heard the   
   familiar stereo hiss come across the speakers, through the large - and larger   
   than it ever appeared to him in the past, given its emptiness today - room.   
   Underworld's Pearl's Girl    
   came through, clean, loud, without distortion. Digitally encoded, rendered   
   through analogue tubes.    
      
   Speaking to him through all these years. Like the Cenotaph or some other   
   monument: classic.   
      
   We forget, he thought, but then we stop forgetting. Is it the memory? Is it   
   us, or is it the artifact? As he toured the old equipment, activating what he   
   thought necessary, skipping the forgotten, abandoned and unfinished projects   
   of prior visitors, he    
   pondered that. Did it matter? Now that the world was pretty much flat?   
      
   As someone more famous than he once wrote, you still had to be pretty high   
   tech to go retro since it meant making all that shit yourself.   
      
   There were still stories to tell - some non-fiction now - that people might   
   come here to hear. Fall was over, school was out.   
      
   What next?   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)