There’s a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city.
The idiot child they’ve placed on the throne does not impress with his acumen.
Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like memory leak and debugger.
See, it’s the sudden cognitive whiplash that does it. One moment you’re cruising along effortlessly at thirty thousand feet while the cabin crew slosh the whisky around in business class, the next you...
Lockhart twitches. I do not think Stockholm syndrome means quite what you think it means. What, the tendency of people—usually women—in unfamiliar societies to enculturate rapidly? Lockhart inclines h...
I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my nee...
He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there’s much difference....
Everything he’s learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Colle...
I gather Andy is still in full-on Office Flying Dutchman mode . . .)
A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all t...
The destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.
Within the shielded darkness of the President’s limousine a geas unlocks in my head, and I can finally remember the message the PM wants me to convey to his counterpart
We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.
Was failure to make tenure track justification for an honor killing?
Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook.
They were brilliant, widely read, incisive, and effortlessly effective analysts and programmers. Which is another reason why, ultimately, so many people died.
There are one and a half billion Muslims on this Earth. A billion and a half Chinese communists, a billion Indian Hindu elephant-worshippers. One point two billion Catholics, misled by the Vatican. An...
The vampire has just realized she’s in a meeting populated exclusively by spooks and people who go bump in the night.
The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyo...
The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and walk...