It also inspired many real-life hackers and computer scientists; a 2001 book about the novella, True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, included essays by Danny Hillis, Marvin Minsky, Mark Pesce, Richard Stallman and others.

Ten weeks after the war and resulting worldwide economic depression from the disruptions in computer systems, Mr. Slippery returns to the Coven and learns that the Mailman may have survived.

The elderly Charteris, an early military computer programmer, reveals that the Mailman was not an extraterrestrial, but a National Security Agency AI research project to protect government systems.

Mistakenly left running, it slowly grew in power and sophistication, and used non-real-time communication to disguise its inability to fully emulate the human mind.

"[2] In 2001, The New York Times declared that Vinge's depiction of "a world rife with pseudonymous characters and other elements of online life that now seem almost ho-hum" had been "prophetic",[3] while Kirkus Reviews called it "still compelling".

[5] In 2001, a collection of essays, True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, was published, with contributions from Danny Hillis, Timothy C. May, Marvin Minsky, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, Mark Pesce, and Richard Stallman.