The Intruder by Greg Krehbiel Read Free Book Online Page A

said.
    Jeremy looked up and realized he was standing in loading zone. He had no idea how long he had been there, looking at one thing or another with one or both eyes. He gave the driver a sheepish grin and moved along.
    *               *               *
    He walked for hours, finding it easier and easier as the day went on. As he became more proficient with the cursor, he began to follow links all over the hole. He could hardly believe how much information was out there.
    In the late afternoon he found a library of old movies. Some of them were things he had watched with his parents, and since the copyright had expired, they were available free of charge. He sat on a park bench and watched "To Catch a Thief."

Chapter 4
     
    "Where's my appetite?" Jeremy said to the ceiling as he lay in bed at 7:30 -- an uncharacteristically late hour for him to rise. In the Community he would have been up by 5:30 to see to his father's goats before heading off to work. But he wasn't expected at the university until 10:00 -- so late in the day, he thought -- and he didn't have much to do until then.
    Well, I guess I better eat, he decided as he rolled out of bed and made his way toward the shower. In five minutes he was washed, dressed and out the door. He left the Armory and Alehouse and headed south on North Capital Street to a restaurant he had seen on one of his walks. It looked clean, popular and cheap, and that was what he wanted. After a few minutes he spied the telltale emblem -- two yellow curved structures that formed an 'm.' It almost smelled like breakfast at his dad's house, just a little more sanitized.
    The rush-hour traffic had stacked the street three deep with hovercars in both the north-bound and south-bound lanes. Jeremy stared for a few minutes at the odd site. One row of vehicles remained at ground level, the next lined up at 15 and the next 30 feet off the ground. Each row formed a perfect line, as if the cars were riding on an invisible road. Most of the windows were dark, but every once in a while Jeremy could see a rider through the window, as if he was in his own little world, drinking a cup of coffee or just staring -- probably reading the news on his implant, Jeremy thought -- or napping. The vehicles passed each other like cogs in a huge machine, and not at all like people.
    Horses are better than hovercars, Jeremy thought. At least you could smell the air and see the world and talk to your neighbor when you were on the back of a horse. The stark contrast between riding Billy, his Palomino, and sitting in one of these automated contraptions seemed like an icon of the reason the Community broke off from Society. It wasn't as if the Community couldn't have built a hovercar -- it had the scientific knowledge and the mechanical capability -- it just wasn't the way people in the Community chose to live. They had machines for some jobs, but for most things, horses or other animals were simply better; more personal, more natural, more humanizing. You couldn't be kind to a hovercar, or care how it felt on a cold winter's day. Jeremy was sure the lack of horses had a darkening effect on the collective mind of Society.
    Technology simply wasn't the answer to everything. The Community knew that; Society didn't. In Society, technology was the unquestioned means to achieve any goal. More than that, technology often separated goals from their natural means. If someone in Society was concerned about his weight, he ate specially engineered diet food. In the Community, he just ate less, or he lived with being fat. No-alcohol beer, caffeine-free coffee, fake sugar and fat, contraception -- they were all Society's efforts to strip the undesired elements from the natural world. The Community hadn't rejected that principle per se -- they used suntan lotion to protect their skin -- it just wasn't the way they saw life. Life was a matter of participating with the natural order -- cultivating it and training it