Terry Pratchett | This page: Next page: | Category: | index pages:
|
Only You Can Save Mankind
Copyright © 1992 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett | ||
---|---|---|
1 The Hero With A Thousand Extra Lives |
Johny fired the laser one more time. Swsssh. He didnt really know why. It was just because you had the joystick and there was the Fire button and that was what it was for. After all, there wasnt a Dont Fire button. | |
Basically, there were two sides to the world. There was the entire computer games software industry engaged in a tremendous effort to stamp out piracy, and there was Wobbler. Currently, Wobbler was in front. | ||
2 Operate Controls To Play Game |
No! We must fight on! And then we die, said the Captain. We fight, and then we die. Thats how it goes. Then we die gloriously! Theres an important word in that sentence, said the Captain. And its not the word gloriously. | |
3 Cereal Killers |
Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called Journey to Alpha Centauri. It was a screen with some dots on it. Because, he said, it happened in real time, which no-one had ever heard of until computers. Hed seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, theyd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home. | Topic: |
His mother was watching the little television in the kitchen, where a very large man disguised as an entire desert was pointing to a lot of red and blue arrows on a map.
Note (Hals): end note | ||
One alien in every box! Wait until they were in every cupboard in the country, send out the signal and bazaam! Cereal killers! Maybe on some other planet somewhere you got a free human in every packet of ammonia-coated Snappi-crystals. Hey, zorks! Collect the Whole Set! And thered be all these little plastic people. Holding guns, of course. | ||
The trouble with all the aliens hed seen was that they either wanted to eat you or play music at you until you became better people. You never got the sort that just wanted to do something ordinary like borrow the lawn mower. | ||
4 |
You shoot at us as well! Self-defence. No! Often you shoot first! With humans, we have often found it essential to get our self-defence in as soon as possible. | |
He wondered why people made such a fuss about dreams. Dream Boat. Dream River. Dream A Little Dream. But when you got right down to it dreams were often horrible, and they felt real. Dreams always started out well and then they went wrong, no matter what you did. You couldnt trust dreams. | Topic: | |
After ten minutes with the index he got as far as prisoners of war, and eventually to the Geneva Convention. It wasnt something you could illustrate with big coloured pictures so there wasnt much about it, but what there was he read with interest. It was amazing. Hed always thought that prisoners were, well, prisonersyou hadnt actually killed them, so they ought to think themselves lucky. But it turned out that you had to give them the same food as your own soldiers, and look after them and generally keep them safe. Even if theyd just bombed a whole city you had to help them out of their crashed plane, give them medicine, and treat them properly. Johnny stared at the page. It was weird. The people whod written the encyclopedia [...] had shoved in all these pictures of parrots and stuff because they were the Natural Wonders of the World, when what was really strange was that human beings had come up with an idea like this. | Topic: | |
7 The Dark Tower |
Bigmacs brother was reliably believed to be in the job of moving video recorders around in an informal way. | |
9 On Earth, |
Ive got to talk to you. I mean face to face. How do I know youre not some sort of maniac? Do I sound like some sort of maniac? Yes! All right, but apart from that? | |
It probably wouldnt be a good idea to tell her. There was a glint in her eye. No, it probably wouldnt be a good idea to be honest. Truthfulness would have to do instead. After all, he hadnt actually lied. | ||
Do you know, she said, there was an African tribe once whose nearest word for enemy was a friend we havent met yet? Johnny smiled. Right, he said. Thats how But they were all killed and eaten in eighteen hundred and two, said Kirsty. Except for those who were sold as slaves. The last one died in Mississippi in eighteen sixty-four, and he was very upset. | ||
10 In Space, |
Why do you just accept everything? Why dont you ever try to change things? Theyre generally bad enough already, he said. | |
11 Humans! |
Shoot them in space, shoot them on a screen, and there was just an explosion and five points on the score total. When theyd been shot from a few metres away, then there was simply a reminder that someone who had been alive was now, very definitely, not alive any more. And would never be again. | |
12 Just Like The Real Thing |
What did you mean . . . you know, back there? When you said I see aliens everywhere? Um. Cant remember. You must have meant something. Im not even sure there are aliens. Only different kinds of us. But I know what the important thing is. The important thing is to be exactly sure about what youre doing. The important thing is to remember its not a game. None of it. Even the games. | |
text checked (see note) Jan 2005 |
Johnny and the Dead
Copyright © 1993 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett | ||
---|---|---|
1 | Wobbler Johnson, who was technically Johnnys best friend, said it was because he was mental. But Yo-less, who read medical books, said it was probably because he couldnt focus his mind like normal people. Normal people just ignored almost everything that was going on around them, so that they could concentrate on important things like, well, getting up, going to the lavatory and getting on with their lives. Whereas Johnny just opened his eyes in the morning and the whole universe hit him in the face. Wobbler said this sounded like mental to him. | |
This was Phase Three of Trying Times, after the shouting, which had been bad, and the Being Sensible About Things (which had been worse; people are better at shouting). [...] There was a vague feeling that it might all work out, now that people had stopped trying to be sensible. | ||
She says witches are abroad on Halloween, said Wobbler. What? Johnnys forehed wrinkled. Like . . . Marjorca and places? Suppose so, said Wobbler. Makes . . . sense, I suppose. They probably get special out-of-season bargains, being old ladies, said Johnny. My aunt can go anywhere on the buses for almost nothing and shes not even a witch. Dont see why Mrs. Nugent is worried, then, said Wobbler. It ort to be a lot safer round here, with all the witches on holiday. | ||
3 |
We all supported Bigmac when he was in juvenile court, didnt we? said Yo-less. You said he was going to get hung, said Wobbler. And I spent all morning doing that Free the Blackbury One poster. It was a political crime, said Bigmac. You stole the Minister of Educations car when he was opening the school, said Yo-less. It wasnt stealing. I meant to give it back, said Bigmac. You drove it into a wall. You couldnt even give it back on a shovel. | Topic: |
The point Im making, said Yo-less, is that youve got to help your friends, right? He turned to Johnny. Now, personally, I think youre very nearly totally disturbed and suffering from psychosomatica and hearing voices and seeing delusions, he said, and probably ought to be locked up in one of those white jackets with the stylish long sleeves. But that doesnt matter, cos were friends. Im touched, said Johnny. Probably, said Wobbler, but we dont care, do we, guys? | Topic: | |
Hed never opened them. Hed just built a bookcase for them. Grandad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity. | Topic: | |
Johnny hesitated. He was by nature an honest person, because apart from anything else, lying was always too complicated. | Topic: | |
5 |
Doing a project. It was amazing. If Saddam Hussein had said he was doing a school project on Kuwait, hed have found life a lot | Topic: |
7 |
The words would fill up the hall until they were higher than peoples heads. They were smooth, soothing words. Soon theyd close over the top of all the trilbies and woolly hats, and everyone would be sitting there like sea anemones. Theyd come here with things to say, even if they didnt know how to say them. The thing was to keep your head down. But if you did keep your head down, youd drown in other peoples words. | Topic: |
Mad is a word used about people whove either got no senses or several more than most other people. | ||
[...] Blackbury Volunteers. Thats a good name. But that doesnt say what were going to do, does it? If we start off not knowing what were going to do, we could do anything, said Johnny. | ||
It was currently occupied only by Adrian Nozzer Miller, whod wanted to be an astronomer because he thought it was all to do with staying up late looking through telescopes, and hadnt bargained on it being basically about adding columns of figures in a little shed in the middle of a windy field. The figures the telescope was producing were all that was left of an exploding star twenty million years ago. A billion small rubbery things on two planets who had been getting on with life in a quiet sort of way had been totally destroyed, but they were certainly helping Adrian get his Ph.D. and, who knows, they might have thought it all worthwhile if anyone had asked them. | ||
I saw a film about this, Sarge, said another policeman. These aliens landed and replaced everyone in the town with giant vegetables. Really? Round here itd be days before anyone noticed, said the sergeant. The constable put the phone down. He just said it was like a strange alien force, he said. [...] And it was invisible, too. Right. Would he recognize it if he didnt see it again? | Topic: | |
Belief in the survival of what is laughably called the soul after death is a primitive superstition which has no place in a dynamic socialist society! They looked at him. You dont tzink, said Solomon Einstein, carefully, that it is worth reconsidering your opinions in the light of experimental evidence? Dont think you can get round me just because youre accidentally right! Just because I happen to find myself still . . . basically here, said William Stickers, does not invalidate the general theory! | Topic: | |
8 | It occurred to Johnny, not for the first time, that the human mind, of which each of his friends was in possession of one almost standard sample, was like a compass. No matter how much you shook it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or later itd carry on pointing the same way. If three-metre-tall green Martians landed on the shopping mall, bought some greetings cards and a bag of sugar cookies and then took off again, within a day or two people would believe it never happened. | |
9 | Real dark forces . . . arent dark. Theyre sort of grey, like Mr. Grimm. They take all the colour out of life; they take a town like Blackbury and turn it into frightened streets and plastic signs and Bright New Futures and towers where no-one wants to live and no-one really does live. The dead seem more alive than us. And everyone becomes grey and turns into numbers and then, somewhere, someone starts to do | |
10 |
You know those games where this ball runs up and bounces around and ends up in a slot at the bottom? Pinball machines? Is that what theyre called now? I think so. Oh. Right. The Alderman nodded. Well . . . when youre bouncing around from pin to pin, it is probably very difficult to know that outside the game theres a room and outside the room theres a town and outside the town theres a country and outside the country theres a world and outside the world theres a billion trillion stars and thats only the start of it . . . but its there, dyou see? Once you know about it, you can stop worrying about the slot at the bottom. And you might bounce around a good deal longer. | Topic: |
11 |
Mr. Grimm had taken life very seriously, starting with his own. People didnt talk much about that sort of thing in those days. Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Jan 2005 |