Short Story:ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’

First time published

Note: The actual title of this story is #ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’, but due to the requirements of MediaWiki's software, page titles cannot contain a hashtag (#).

Synopsis

Based in what would have been the near future, Darren Thompson is an independent technician operating an artificial reality machine repair service. He’s called by the police to come to the scene of a death involving one such machine, with a representative of the machine’s manufactory present. His job is to determine if it was the machine—a rather elaborate model—or something else that caused the user’s death. But there’s something about this corpse in particular…

Author's note

In a preface to the story in the anthology A Blink of the Screen, Terry Pratchett says:
“This was published in 1990 in the anthology Digital Dreams, edited by Dave Barrett. I was tempted to ‘update’ this–after all, it’s about Virtual Reality, haha, remember that everybody? I am so old I can remember virtual reality!–but what’s the point? Besides, it would be cheating.
“I just liked the idea of an amiable repairman, not very bright but good with machines, padding the streets of a quiet, dull, sleeping world. Things are breaking down, knowledge is draining away, and he’s driving his van around the sleeping streets, helping people dream.
“Now, many years later, it appears rather chilly and maybe quite close to home.”

Publication history

• 1990 - Digital Dreams (collection of original stories, edited by David V. Barrett, featuring Terry Pratchett's name on the cover)
• 1997 - Cyber-Killers (edited by Peter Haining, writing as Ric Alexander
• 2004 - Once More* *with Footnotes
• 2012 - A Blink of the Screen