"But I know intimately that it's not what I do. Say there's a 12-year-old who's reading Neuromancer for the first time. If she's really smart, she gets 10 or 15 pages into it and she's thinking, "Okay, it's got to be about what happened to all the cellphones." I mean, that's what I would have done. Because that's weird! They don't have any cellphones. And what was for a while one of the coolest moments in the book hinges around the bank of payphones in an airport in 2030. And you can't even find a bank of payphones in an airport in 2015!"I know those feels. My long-dead attempt at cyberpunk-ish noir, which was going to be a sort of near-future Heat-meets-Count Zero, now finds itself set a couple years in the past. And it begins with our protagonist's pager going off and him walking over to the pay phone to call the number.
It's funny, because by 2012, payphones were already pretty much a reliable sign of a bad neighborhood. And a pager? Who has those anymore?
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