| DOT COM'S FIRST ADVENTURE | ||
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INTERNET VOYAGER! |
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A Searcher like me - I was never alone With him, I flew the blue sky of the Net… Long time now - but I'll never forget My friend of the Search Zone, my friend of the sky Gets harder without him- as time goes by…" "Didn't mean it" he muttered. "You know I didn't mean it. It was… it was… a power surge. You know I tried to bring him back… I just… I just… couldn't stop it… I just couldn't…" Adrienne made an angry clucking noise like Dot had sometimes heard squirrels make in the park. She hopped down from her Search Engine, her bushy red tail swishing behind her, and came over and stood in front of Blackshanks with her paws on her hips. "Zen why did you not perform a Recovery?" she asked. "Zat would have brought Luis back from Void, for sure!" "Aw… I'd lost the disc… somebody took it… I couldn't get one in time. Give me a break - it all just went wrong, that's all. If I could put it right, I would! I may be a bad guy, but I don't do Void! Come on!" Adrienne grunted, and Cursor let out a big, big sigh. Dot felt really puzzled. Every time she thought she'd understood, at least a bit, what was going on in Net-world, something new happened that she didn't understand at all! Louise D saw her face and laughed softly. "OK Dot I'd better explain" she said. "I used to double-bank search with a Borzoi dog, a Searcher called Luis de la Zarpana… we landed badly one day and while we were fixing our Search Engines down here, up comes friend Blackshanks. He was offering a deal for some really hard-to-get information we needed for the computer team at Oxfam…it was good work, we like helping charities like them. But then" her gentle voice went hard, and she stared at Blackshanks "he decides to invert Luis. Just for fun - what Inverters like him think is fun, anyway. Trouble was, just as he did it, there was an Information Storm all across the Internet - some hacker doing some stupid thing, and that put a big surge of power into Blackshanks - these bad guys hang together, you know. So instead of just an inversion like Wizard here went through, Blackshanks sent Luis into Void - extra power like that sends everything out of control, you see." Dot frowned. "But what's Void?" Mr Mouse spoke up. His voice was very serious. "It's the end of everything, kid" he said. "No-one from Networld ever comes back from there. No chance. Not unless you get a Recovery disc going in about 20 seconds. Even then…" He shrugged. "It's like when you're writing something in a Word document on your computer and you go Ctrl A by mistake and highlight the whole document you're doing and don't know you've done it. If you hit ANY key after that, what you've done vanishes. Zip. 'Course you can get it back by going Ctrl Z, but lotsa folks get in a fright and hit Save…then all you've got left is a blank page, or one with just one thing on it - the letter you hit after going Ctrl A." He frowned. "That's what Void is like. The worst place to be. No way back…" There was a silence, with only the zisshing noise of the search engines going overhead, and the little clickings as the search lights came on and off. Dot looked up into the green and gold and blue sky, stretching away as far as she could see above the soft wavy ground of the Search Zone with its millions of little lights, and the strange shapes of the C-drive houses and their snaky cables disappearing beneath the Zone's surface. A search engine shaped like a tea-pot glided past and landed near one of them to re-boot. Then Cursor spoke. "Y'know, there is just one way... never seen it work, but… they do say, a Neophyte can do it. Maybe." "Well… could we find a… a Neophyte then?" asked Dot. Cursor nodded, grinning. "Wouldn't have to look far, honey" he drawled "We got one right here!" He clicked his fingers. "You!" ********************************* |
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