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by Mo Martin
Joe Ayres couldn't believe his luck. Slaving away on the Picayune's moribund science section, trying to get some basic information on the history of computer programming, just so he could have half a sense of what his dingbat interviewees had said for this article, he may have stumbled on the scoop of the century, hell, of the goddamn millenium. And it was pure dumb luck. All of the books in the library had long ago had their stamp cards replaced with bar codes. Most of the cards had been trashed during the process. But fluttering out of the mildewed pages of "Introduction to Purl, C++, and BASIC" came a sepia-toned check out card. And sketched on it was a shape familiar to the entire human race, the basic outline of the AgYag Model 1s, the first PR, personal robots that had appeared on the market, the humanoid devices that had changed the entire world from a bunch of half-starved laborers to a race of philosopher-kings of leisure, spending all their time on science, poetry, art and so on. Least that was the theory. It was more like half the world lived the high life as the AYMs became more advanced and helpful, and half the world died, slow and ugly, with no work, no food, and the unfeeling eyes of the philosopher-kings on them. And here was the kicker: the very last checkout date on the card was 10 years before the first AgYags showed up on the market. Joe couldn't believed that of all the mook Journos out there, filling up the papers with fluff pieces with how great everything was over here and how shitty it was over there, he of all people should stumble on to perhaps the only vital clue to the identity of the man that had made the world what it was. Mr. Penny, the mysterious, never seen inventor of the AgYags, the richest man in the world. But had he really only needed ten years from programming to AgYags? Where was he? What did he do now?
by Mo Martin72 hours later, Joe Ayres had his answers, and was bleeding to death in a gutter.
End. Ch. 1
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