Imagining the Information Age: Stories/Visions

Across the street, where sibyls sit in storefronts, beckoning, begins and one block later ends the sidewalk of stopped time. Step in, step on, not the cracks but the white-and-black painted shadows. Here's four o'clock in dark mid-December; here's midsummer afternoon, still and furnace-hot. The time's metered: you can't have more than an hour, and it will cost you. The price is change. Can you afford it? Think before you stop; but you'll stop once anyway, curious, and the light moves, and you don't: here's where you met, and a meter on is where you quarrelled; here's parting, and forever gone. The shopkeepers don't approve, and won't make change for you. You must make your own.

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