IGN is the Wirehead (Sega-CD) resource with reviews, wikis, videos, trailers, screenshots, cheats, walkthroughs, previews, news and release dates.Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers. Book excerpt. Chapter 1 of Larry Niven's. The Ringworld Engineersavailable from Amazon. Published: 1. 98. CHAPTER 1 - - UNDER THE WIRE. Louis Wu was under the wire when two men came to invade his privacy. His smile was blissful, dreamy. The apartment was small, just one big room. He could see both doors. Wirehead Studios website. Sometimes a picture is worth more than any number of words, and while it's hard to show visually all the code changes going on we can. Wirehead (1997) - informacje o filmie w bazie Filmweb.pl. Oceny, recenzje, obsada, dyskusje wiadomo Imagine a future where money can buy a genius brain. Thoughtful on the risk of some possibilities. Wirehead plays at SF Playhouse March 15 to April 23 2011. Wirehead has the reach and resources to connect you with the very best IT professional talent. Wirehead is a first-person perspective 'interactive movie' video game where a seemingly, average, family man learns that he has a hi-tech device inside his brain. But, lost in the joy that only a wirehead knows, he never saw them arrive. Suddenly they were there: two pale youths, both over seven feet tall, studying Louis with contemptuous smiles.
One snorted and dropped something weapon- shaped in his pocket. They were stepping forward as Louis stood up. It was the fist- sized droud that protruded like a black plastic canker from the crown of Louis Wu's head. They were dealing with a current addict, and they knew what to expect. For years the man must have had no thought but for the wire trickling current into the pleasure center of his brain. He would be near starvation from self- neglect. He was small, a foot and a half shorter than either of the invaders. He - -. As they reached for him Louis bent far sideways, for balance, and kicked once, twice, thrice. One of the invaders was down, curled around himself and not breathing, before the other found the wit to back away. Too late, he reached for the stunner he'd pocketed. Louis kicked it out of his hand. He ducked a massive fist and kicked at kneecap, kneecap (the pale giant stopped moving), groin, heart (the giant bent far forward, with a whistling scream), throat (the scream stopped suddenly). Louis chopped at his neck, twice. At no time had the blissful smile left his face, and it did not change when he found his door fully locked and alarmed. He checked the door to the balcony: bolted and alarmed. At some time in their histories, most of the cultures of human space have seen the habit as a major scourge. It takes users from the labor market and leaves them to die of self- neglect. Generations later, these same cultures usually see current addiction as a mixed blessing. Older sins - - alcoholism and drug addiction and compulsive gambling - - cannot compete. People who can be hooked by drugs are happier with the wire. They take longer to die, and they tend not to have children. An ecstasy peddler can raise the price of the operation, but for what? The user isn't a wirehead until the wire has been embedded in the pleasure center of his brain. Then the peddler has no hold over him, for the user gets his kicks from house current. Tasps are illegal on most worlds, and expensive to make, but they are used. From behind a tree you make his day. For a moment he's got no worries at all ..) They don't generally ruin lives. Most people can take it. He reached across his smooth scalp to the base of the long black braid, and pulled the droud from its socket beneath the hair. He held it in his hand, considering; then, as always, he dropped it into a drawer and locked it. The drawer disappeared. The desk, which seemed a massive wooden antique, was actually paper- thin hullmetal, with endless room for secret compartments. He'd done it routinely in the early years of his addiction. Neglect had made of him a skeletal rag doll, constantly dirty. Finally he had gathered what remained of his ancient dogged determination, and he had built a timer that took twenty minutes of nitpicking concentration to reset. On its present setting it would give him fifteen hours of current and twelve hours for sleep and for what he called maintenance. Louis had no idea what to do about that. If he'd called the police immediately, it would still have attracted unwanted attention .. That he'd been knocked unconscious? They'd want to deep- radar his head for fractures! He followed his maintenance routine like a robot. Even his dinner was preprogrammed. He went to the bathroom. He did ten minutes of exercise, pushing himself hard, fighting depression with exhaustion. He avoided looking at the stiffening corpses. Dinner was ready when he finished. He ate without tasting .. For a time he had lived with a woman who was also a wirehead. They had made love under the wire .. By then Louis had regained enough of his natural caution to flee Earth. But if he were already being watched? Large, soft in the muscle, pale from a sunlight more orange than yellow, they were certainly low- gravity types, probably Canyonites. They hadn't fought like ARMs .. These men could be ARM hirelings, with friends waiting. Until a few hundred years ago its atmosphere was just dense enough to support photosynthesis- using plants. The air held oxygen, but was too thin for human or kzinti life. The native life was as primitive and hardy as lichen. Animal had never developed at all. The Kzinti Empire swallowed the planet and staffed it with the aid of domes and compressors. They called it Warhead, for its proximity to the unconquered Pierin worlds. The kzinti have always had a tendency to attack before they are quite ready. Civilization on Canyon is a legacy of the Third Man- Kzin War, when the human world Wunderland developed a taste for esoteric weapons. It was a gigantic version of what is commonly a mining tool: a disintegrator that fires a beam to suppress the charge on the electron. Where a disintegrator beam falls, solid matter is rendered suddenly and violently positive. It tears itself into a fog of monatomic particles. Rock and kzinti factories and housing spewed away as dust, and a solid bar of lightning flowed between the two points. The weapon chewed twelve miles deep into the planet, exposing magma throughout a region the size and shape of Baja California on Earth, and running roughly east and west. The kzinti industrial complex vanished. The few domes protected by stasis fields were swallowed by magma, magma that welled higher in the center of the great gash before the rock congealed. The Kzinti Patriarchy is not normally terrified by sheer magnitude. Wunderlanders have no such doubts. Canyon's native life suffered, of course, from the gigatons of dust that dropped on its surface, and from the loss of water that precipitated within the canyon itself to form the sea. In the canyon there is comfortable air pressure and a thriving pocket- sized civilization. Night shadowed the canyon floor as he stepped outside, but the southern face still glowed with daylight. Hanging gardens of native lichen dripped from the rim. Old elevators were silver threads standing miles high against the cut stone. Transfer booths had made these obsolete for travel, but tourists still used them for the view. The vegetation had the wild look of a kzinti hunting park, with pink and orange blended into the imported terrestrial biosphere. Kzinti life was common throughout the canyon. But their ears flared like pink Chinese parasols, and their tails were nude and pink, and their straight legs and big hands marked them as toolmakers. They stood eight feet tall, and though they scrupulously avoided bumping human tourists, carefully tended claws slid out above black fingertips if a human passed too close. Some might have ancestors here, alive in frozen time in the domes buried beneath this lava island. One day they'd have to be dug up .. Men and kzinti had climbed those sheer cliffs for sport, in the low gravity. It was one of his three routes out. The second was the elevators; the third, a transfer booth to the Lichen Gardens. But most of the world was barren moonscape. A careful man could land a spacecraft undetected, and could hide it where only a deep- radar search would find it. For these past nineteen years Louis Wu's ship had been waiting, hidden in a cave in the northward- facing cliff of a mountain of low- grade metal ore: a hole hidden within permanent shadow on Canyon's airless surface. Let Louis Wu get to the surface and he was home free. But the ARM could be watching all three exits. How could Earth's police force have found him? He had changed his face, his hair style, his way of life. The things he loved best were just the things he had given up. He used a bed instead of sleeping plates, he avoided cheese as if it were spoiled milk, and his apartment was furnished with mass- produced retractables. The only clothes he owned were of expensive natural fiber, with no optical effects at all. Since then he had forced a rational diet on himself; he had tortured himself with exercise and a weekly course in martial arts (mildly illegal, and the local police would register him if they caught him, but not as Louis Wu!) until today he was an adequate facsimile of glowing health, with the hard muscles a younger Louis Wu had never bothered to attain. How could the ARM recognize him? No common burglar could have passed Louis's alarms. Now, a bit late, he felt the shame of the man- killer. But they had invaded his territory, and there is no guilt under the wire. Even pain is a spice added to joy, and joy - - like the basic human joy of killing a thief in the act - - becomes hugely intensified. They had known what he was, and that was both sufficient warning and a direct affront to Louis Wu. If an ARM was watching him now, it would be through binoculars, from a window in one of those black- eyed buildings. None of the tourists were looking up .. What caught Louis's eye was the way the fur grew. It was tufted, patchy, and whitened over more than half the alien's body, as if the skin below were extensively scarred. There were black markings around his eyes, and the eyes weren't looking at scenery. They were searching the faces of passing humans. He turned and went inside, in no obvious haste. He locked his balcony doors and reset the alarms, and then he dug his droud out of its hiding place in the table. Speaker- To- Animals, once an ambassador to human space; Speaker, who with Louis Wu and a Pierson's puppeteer and a very odd human girl had explored a minuscule section of the enormous structure called the Ringworld; who had earned his full name from the Patriarch of Kzin for the treasure he brought back. You could die, now, for calling him by a profession, but what was his new name? Wirehead – IT Recruiting and Staffing Agency.
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