"The Pardoner's Tale"
This story was written by Robert Silverberg and was first published in Playboy in 1987. In the future, an alien species has colonized the Earth and used the humans' own information infrastructure to control them through their in-body implants. Hackers have become valuable because they can exploit the system. Some hackers have become known as pardoners because they can arrange for people to escape the aliens' sentences in exchange for profit. The story focuses on one of the best pardoners. He is bested in a hacking duel only to find out that his opponent is an android. The pardoner faces a mistake he made in his past and finds a way to escape by hacking the alien mainframe with the help of a woman he had swindled.
Read more about this topic: Hackers (anthology)
Famous quotes containing the words pardoner and/or tale:
“This Pardoner hadde heer as yelow as wex,
But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)