Can anyone help me find a near-future sci fi short story I read many years ago about a hacker whose sentence was never to use computers again? I believe the sentence was enforced through an implant that made him suffer if he thought about doing so. As I recall he was on the verge of starvation because he couldn't do so much as pay for food without using a computer.  The story involved someone, maybe the narrator?, taking pity on him and buying him a meal at the diner where he'd been staring in the window or something.  It felt like perhaps Philip K. Dick or Gibson, maybe, but I could be misremembering.
121014
I read a short (in the range of 5-20 pages) science fiction story a while ago, and can't remember the title of the story or its author at the moment.  The basic story is that of a super-savvy computer hacker who got all of his knowledge of computers removed from his brain, temporarily (one year?) for cybercrime, including (IIRC) some form of identity theft, and is released into the public without any jail-time or anything. This is very hard on him, for this future-Earth relies heavily on highly interconnected computers for basic and daily needs. This is not immediately clear at the start of the story, but it becomes apparent after a little while.  Part of the story includes the main character (I don't remember if he is granted a name in the story) wanders into a cafe or a bar, and is invited to play a game of digital, . He has to turn down the invite, though, because he doesn't know and is blocked from knowing how to use computers. He also really doesn't want the other characters to know this, because apparently having your computer knowledge removed from your brain for cybercrime is a major stigma in that society. The character also has difficulty using his (futuristic equivalent of a) credit card, as that also requires some computer knowledge.  Any ideas?
98744
The novel centers around a man living a comfortable existence in the pretty distant future.  To support himself, he is occasionally asked to enter a box which will copy his entire body, and send it out faster than the speed of light to some developing world, to work.  His copy on this world wakes up and realizes what a big mistake he's made.  The copy does grueling work, feels lonely, and eventually just dies of radiation sickness.  Back on earth, the man never realizes how bad it is out there, and keeps sending out more copies.  I think the story is probably 80s or earlier - not sure if it's a short story, or the beginning of a novel which I lost &amp; never finished.
28106
Many years ago I remember reading a short story about an advanced civilization at war that rediscovers how to do math mentally. The reason I remember it is the guy tells it to government officials who are delighted because it means they can put people inside bombs or missiles instead of computers, which were thought to be more valuable.  I believe this is one of those stories I read in a science fiction anthology my father brought home on one of his business trips in the sixties or seventies.
5351
All I can remember is that there were some (human) scientists(?) who had a portal through which they could observe a family(?) who seemed to be on a pic-nic(?) Somehow, they realised the aliens (?) were cannibals - but only when the latter noticed them watching and rushed towards the portal!  I don't remember whether the aliens got out - or anything else much really - but I'd really love to find this story again in the hope that re-reading it would stop it haunting the edges of my imagination/memory!  Anyone ...?
48736
I'm trying to find the title and author of the short story that seems to have predicted computer games.  The main character was a macho adventurer who was recruited by a scientist to enter a strange other-dimensional realm in which death came suddenly and unexpectedly.   The adventurer would enter the realm, learn a little bit and then die violently only to reawaken in the real world, to try again repeatedly.
4766
I'm trying to locate a short sci-fi story I read years ago about a human that is "resurrected" by an arrogant and malignant alien species that discovers him in a "museum" on an earth where the inhabitants, though very advanced, had been wasted by a close encounter (I believe) with a neutron star. He is the third or fourth human they "reconstruct" and it turns out that he is an advanced mentalist, disappearing at the moment of his "resurrection". He outwits the aliens and eventually tricks them into plunging their ship into the sun in order (they think) to prevent him from finding out where they come from. Any suggestions?
96038
I'm looking for a short story that takes place in a sort of utopian future, where no one has to work because machines do everything. People can basically sit and do nothing all day, but this is unsatisfying for some. They end up getting a job where they go around and tighten screws that are loosened on the machinery due to their vibrations. They find this work satisfying, and work everyday.  At the end of the story, we learn that another crew wakes up every night and goes around loosening screws.
54509
I'm looking for a short story whose title I can't remember.  In it a wealthy man practices cloning and consciousness transfer to achieve immortality, often parading older bodies around his estate naked (not a nice guy). The story follows a final transplant, which doesn't go as expected. The man is left trapped with his memories and no ability to speak, while the clone walks off behaving exactly as he would.
110075
I read a sci fi short story sometime between 1974-1980 but it may have been written long before that.  I believe it was in a paper back anthology of sci fi stories, but I'm not certain.  I think the protagonist is facing the final climactic conflict when we meet him.  Most of the story is memories and flashbacks.  The first flashback is to his childhood.  He and his younger brother are sled riding.  His brother crashes, ruptures his spleen and dies.  He feels responsible and is wracked with guilt.  Much later, as an adult, he is exploring a long-deserted alien base on the moon.  There are unfamiliar artifacts on the base, including a time-travel device/vehicle, and a tool with an anti-matter tip.  It carves neat holes and eliminates matter simply by moving it through matter.  He accidentally drops the tool, which plummets unimpeded to the center of the moon.  He realizes that over time, it will consume and destroy the moon, which will be catastrophic for Earth.  He uses the time-travel device to travel to the moon at an earlier time so that he can prevent himself from dropping the tool.  He makes bigger problems for himself, forcing him to travel back further and further in time.  He travels so far back that he encounters the original alien inhabitants of the base.  Now we are at the present time in the story.  This is his final conflict, he has to escape, travel forward in time and resolve all of the problems he created.  Unfortunately, the alien inhabitants capture him, and the story ends.  Can anyone identify the story and author?
108817
I am trying to located a sci-fi short story book that I read when I was a child. One of the stories was about an undercover agent (in the future I guess) who poses as a customer (for a most dangerous drug) to infiltrate the criminal network which distributes or produces this drug. After he is injected with the drug by the nurse or one of the drug people, police raid the building and capture the criminals. The agent has a happy life after that until his 80th birthday when he wakes up and find himself that he is still in bed where he got the drug (that is, whatever he saw until 80th birthday was a dream), the police raid and this time the criminals get away. Again so many years later he wakes up to find himself in the same place (the room where he got the drug). This keeps going on (his life is a continuous waking up from dreams) as the result of taking the drug ... there were other stories too like a chimp who has become as intelligent as a human thanks to a drug or treatment and since the effect of the drug was wearing off he is going back to being a stupid chimp again ... I read it in the 1980s so my guess is that the original book must be from 1960s or 1970s.   The first story has some similarity with A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick but is different.  Any idea which book these stories might be from?
9424
I'm looking for a book of science fiction short stories. One of the stories describes the experiences of a man who finds himself in a corridor with a dead body. The corridor turns out to be a Möbius strip. I must have read that late 1970s.
60434
Okay, similar questions to this have been asked before, but not about the particular short story I am trying to find.  It was in an anthology of short sci fi stories, possibly award winning ones or at least someone's compilation of favourites. (I think)   It was a long time ago, maybe 1970s or 80s, so the story could date back to even the 1960s for all I know, but probably the 1970s.  It was the funniest story about time travel where a person meets incarnations of himself, that I have ever read. It was either derivative of 'By His Bootstraps' or the other way around, but my recollection is that this story was funnier.  Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me and it WAS 'By His Bootsraps', but I am almost certain that it wasn't, because when I read that recently it seemed unfamiliar and not as funny.  In the one I am trying to recall, the guy is also bemused and irritated by the behaviour of other incarnations of himself, like the Heinlen story, but the repartee between versions of himself and his extreme frustration is much more hilarious.  I have a vague recollection that he is in a spaceship during the story, but not absolutely sure. There seemed to be a lot of clambering around, ladders, bulkheads, etc, unlike the Heinlen story.  I'm almost certain it isn't any of the commonly suggested stories and I'm quite sure it wasn't a short film where he shoots his older self, or a full length novel. Someone will have read it and (un)remembered it fondly like me, I feel sure!
73013
I read this story a couple of years ago but can't seem to find it since.It's a short story.  The story starts with a programmer debugging a program and not being able to find the bug. Frustrated, he decides to disassemble the program and look at the assembly and found instructions that can't possibly come from the original source code. He then looks at the compiler for the source of the bug and even recompiles the compiler but the alien code still managed to make it into the program.  Then he decides to actually see what the alien code does and finds that it's trying to do something simple like adding two numbers but doing it in a completely non-intuitive way. He concludes that no human would do it that way and starts suspecting a virus.  Later he finds alien code everywhere from the compiler (not in the source of the compiler) to the assembler to the OS down even to the router in his office at which point he begins to suspect that the alien code may even be part or the CPU itself (modern CPUs after all are designed on computers).  The story ends with the programming team receiving a letter from another engineering team (I forget if it's Geneva or Tokyo or somewhere else) stating that they've found the same thing but every effort they've tried to publish their findings got censored by the emerging AI (hence the handwritten letter).
97360
I'm trying to find an English-language short story I read in a collection about five to ten years ago (I don't have any idea of the original publication date).    Here's everything I remember:   The story is about human astronauts landing on an alien's planet, from the alien's point of view. Every organism on the alien planet is part of a single hive mind, and they can telepathically infect the humans (the aliens view this as beneficial, as any mind separated from the hive must be suffering), but choose not to once they realize that there's an entire planet of humans out there. The narrator alien is an organism that was designed by the hive to mimic a non-essential component on the spacecraft, so it can stow away when the humans return to Earth. The narrator alien is preparing to infect all of Earth as soon as the shuttle's door opens, but the component it replaced was the wire that opens the door, so it is fried instantly by the current.   Despite knowing all these elements of the story, I haven't had luck Googling it, because so many of these elements are very common sci-fi themes on their own, and I don't remember any unique names/terms.  I don't remember if I read this in a Sci-fi anthology book, or in a magazine (like 'Asimov').  Thanks in advance if anyone can help me track this one down, it's been bugging me for a long while.
80394
I read a story some years ago (probably about 35) in an monthly sci-fi anthology...  It's set in a prison.  The main character is a psychopath who has sessions with a psychiatrist - in these sessions he always blames a person in his earlier life for his condition: uncle, father, mother, sibling... each time returning to his cell - time travelling to his earlier life and killing that person...   Example: He blames his father for leading him into bad ways - goes back in time and kills his father. Next session he blames his mother (and the fact that he grew up with no father in his life) - goes back in time and kills his mother.  Next session he blames a carer (and the fact that he grew up an orphan) etc...  The story had a very clever dénouement, which is hidden in a spoiler section below.  I would love to read this again - any ideas?    Edited to add: I hope I have explained the format sufficiently - the point is, the psychiatrist helps him to identify where he began to go off the rails and who in his life was responsible. Later when he is alone in his cell he goes back in time (the mechanism for this is not explained - it's as if he can will himself to go to that time) and kills the person identified as responsible.  When he attends his next session: his reality, his history, is different so another person has to be identified as the cause of his problems... the story has a Groundhog Day feel to it...  The final paragraph, the end of the story, has him       sitting once again in front of the Psychiatrist and as if it is suddenly dawning on him he looks up slowly, 'realising' that all his problems started when he first came to see this psychiatrist!  Thus leaving the reader in no doubt who will die when he later travels back in time to just before his first session with the psychiatrist...
99372
I'm searching for a short story I read probably around 20 years ago in a school anthology. It was set in a futuristic setting, where consumerism was rampant. The two protagonists were a door-to-door salesman and its customer.   In this futuristic setting a person could buy things with credit not only by indebting himself but also by indebting the first X years of his son's salary (this even when the son was a child... So you could buy a new TV by exchanging it with the first year of the future salary of your son, to make an example).   The customer was already quite heavily indebted (and clearly already had his house full of things he hadn't ever used, like a pool), and the salesman was trying to persuade the customer to indebt a little of his son's future salaries. If I remember correctly, the customer hadn't still indebted his son, and he was reluctant to do so, but he had already nearly tapped out all of his personal future salary. The salesman used at least two ways to persuade the customer:   he told him that anything he bought would then be used by his son, and a day would become his son's property (at the death of the customer), so it was OK to use the son's future salaries. AND, big "secret", he told him that his neighbour had already indebted his yet-to-be-born niece. He told the customer that his company would have to invent new things to sell to this neighbour :-)
69588
I am looking for the name and author associated with a story that I read in a magazine (probably Analog) in the mid 1990s.  The primary conceit was that there exist certain people around whom machines, computers etc. simply fail more often then they do when these folks are not around. There is a log-scale for denoting how strong the effect is.  Other useful tidbits:   It may have been one of a running time-line. It took place at a special facility on the moon---out of the way of others who might come to harm---with heavy redundancy of simple systems to provide atmospheric services, food, etc . and where these people have been (voluntarily, I believe) concentrated for research purposes. The narrator notes that everyone in this select group owns their own crowbar (using it to achieve egress from their own cubicle after a failure of the door...) It involved a nanotech spacesuit design. There is mention of a no-fly zone around the facility.