Mr. Gibson,

If we're ever lucky enough to have you read this: thank you.

You shaped the world we live in, and somewhere in it you left a place
for us. You gave a scattered tribe its words, its spirit, and something
like a code. You wrote that the street finds its own uses for things.
We're some of those uses, and we grew up not only in the world you
imagined, but with it.

Some days the present feels like a fever-dream reading of what you saw
coming: some of us stimmed up in a coffin down in the Sprawl, some
squatting on the Bay Bridge, all of us sliding, no comets, toward the
jackpot. But it's a better world for having you in it.

With gratitude,
everyone, from those who picked up an Omni in May 1981 to anyone who's
touched a keyboard in the world that followed

    and among them, us: the burnt-out cowboys at cyberspace7.org