Autarchies had been shattered, hermit kingdoms destroyed. Almost a billion had died in war, plague, starvation, and madness. But worse was yet to come, as what passed for civilization on this world gu...
Are you a psychiatrist? I don’t think so. He shuffles forward, heading towards a side bay that, as I approach it, turns out to be a day room of some sort. Then I’m not Napoleon Bonaparte!
Anyway, you don’t have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD, Karim grumps. You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way—
American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.
America is the place where you cannot kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to go...
The ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant.
★★The geas Billington’s running. It’s the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence.
¿Es que no saben que el único ordenador inhackeable es el que tiene instalado un sistema operativo seguro y está encerrado en una caja fuerte de acero enterrada bajo una tonelada de hormigón en el fon...
Wait—something’s gumming up Bosch. (Computers aren’t as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.)
The first law of demonology is that if you can see it, it can see you. But
Skeletal. It would hardly be unprecedented, don’t you think? So here’s your new assignment: you will establish a new agency, recruit agents, and direct them—I have a little list of those who won’t be...
Scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the vo...
His arms. Human. Cat. Human. Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in...
Concentrate on my deep breathing and the whole mindfulness shtick and on trying not to casually squeeze the contents of a taxiing aluminum tube of intercontinental goodness into my imaginary mouth—it’...
Before the hardcore idiots began cooking up bombs and declaring war on the System, a System that had ultimately gotten tired of their posturing and rolled over in its sleep, obliterating them.
Because there’s something joyless and deadening in the air, as if what this room really holds is the decaying miscarried fetus of the human future. Anyone who lingers here will sicken and die, just as...
You want to know what it’s like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company.
We shouldn’t even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we’re management, not heroes.
We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!
This is rural England, after all; please set your watch back thirty years