10 INPUT “What is your name?”; NAME$
20 CLS
30 PRINT “Hello “; NAME$ “. Your parents have just had shag wall-to-wall installed.”
40 PRINT “It’s light tan, approximately the same color as this surprising piece of consumer technology the company provided, you’re told, for nothing”
50 INPUT “What is it?”; COMPUTER$
60 IF COMPUTER$=”TI-99/4A” THEN GOTO 100 ELSE GOTO 70
70 PRINT “When what strikes us as a true future finally arrives — l’avenir rather than le futur — it does not break with all causality, but rather follows some other causality, as yet unknown to us. Posthuman accounts of the future do not rely on the miraculous, but rather recognize the parallel and sometimes intersecting powers of nonhuman or otherwise alternate causalities, which only seem to come to us from nowhere. Such was this machine.”
80 PRINT “All you can do is guess again.”
90 GOTO 50
100 PRINT “You remember enough BASIC from programming the school’s Apple IIe to try writing a character generator for the AD&D Unearthed Arcana. In 1985, the TI-99/4A is obsolete as consumer technology. It works for you though. Late arrivals to tech get free, working garbage. You are an unwitting devotee of salvage.”
110 PRINT “You get no further than the Ranger.”
120 End

Karl Steel is associate professor of medieval English literature at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is currently writing about feral children, sky burial, and oysters.