Futurismic, the science-fiction writers' group-blog, announced a while back that it was going to start publishing fiction, and put out a call for submissions. Today, they published their first work, a story called "The Factwhore Proposition" by Campbell-, Hugo-, Nebula- and Sidewise-Nominee Charles Coleman Finlay.
I quite liked the story: it's a distopian work about the commoditization of knowledge work — Google Answers meets McDonalds — with a nice bit of characterization in the protagonist, who is clearly the spiritual descendant of today's web-geeks.
Even after all these years, he couldn't believe the stupid questions people asked. With so much information available online, it was difficult, sometimes impossible, to phrase a search string properly to narrow the hits down to find what you wanted, especially when much of the best info was hidden by exclusionary marketing agreements or sequestered behind gates. People would rather pay someone else to do it. And with the big bio-boom, some people had the money to spare. Dylan was not some people. The gap between the haves and have-nots had been blown Grand Canyon wide by the new technology, with those who could afford the enhancements on a narrow ledge that kept moving farther away from everyone else. But if Dylan roped himself to enough of the haves, maybe he could pull his way over to the other side.
