All 6 Cory Doctorow Stories Available for Free:
Stories of the Future Present contains the following tech related science fiction stories: “Printcrime,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “Anda’s Game,” “I, Robot,” “I, Row-Boat,” and “After the Siege.” Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, all six have been added to Offworlders for free download. Download them all and share them with your friends! This is a superb collection of stories that explore various aspects of technology from in-game third world sweatshop “gold farmers” to the heroic deeds of systems administrators that save the planet! Download links for each story is in this paragraph.
One of my favorite stories was “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” since I spent ten years as one of those network pukes myself. I never did save the Earth, but I am confident that my gallant actions saved a few zeros and ones. I remember one particular woeful day when myself and the lead programmer took a hard drive out of a crashed database server and stuck it in an ancient computer Moses himself once used as a WINS server, turned it on, and the gods were with us and that thing started up and bought us time to restore the real server. Whew!
Here is a short passage from When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” by Doctorow:
The sysadmins came out of the woodwork. The Googleplex was online, with the stalwart Queen Kong bossing a gang of rollerbladed grunts who wheeled through the gigantic data-center swapping out dead boxes and hitting reboot switches. The Internet Archive was offline in the Presidio, but the mirror in Amsterdam was live and they’d redirected the DNS so that you’d hardly know the difference. Amazon was down. Paypal was up. Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal were all up, and filling with millions of posts from scared survivors huddling together for electronic warmth.”
Ah, tasty stuff! I can hear the array of server fans humming like a hive full of killer bees. Good times.