Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information, Sammann said. Crap, you once called it, I re...
Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own run up onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start. But each slowed, spread thin, faltered, d...
Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.
Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the N...
Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing—this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing—is quite fundamental and underlies man...
CRACKING A WHIP MADE OF SMALL ROBOTS JOINED END TO END into a long, flexible chain was neither an especially bad nor an especially good way of engaging a foe in ambot-based combat. Extensive studies c...
But the television news cameras couldn’t get anywhere near the action, so the coverage mostly consisted of journalists interviewing each other about how little they knew.
But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation sk...
But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous.
Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more tech...
Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, an...
Better take her uniform -- all that gear, the second MetaCop suggests, notunlewdly.The manager looks at Y.T., trying not to let his gaze travel sinfully up anddown her body. For thousands of years his...
BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements – this is how they convince themselves they didn’t get ripped off.
As soon as you're sure you're right, there's no point in your being here.
As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that wa...
And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
And I tell you straight out: suspicious this makes me, for what is the cause to bring magic back when it has been replaced by something clearly more serviceable? So the first riddle I put my mind to w...
All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.
After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage,
A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates to distribute, once he’d thought of the idea. The hard part was selling it—reassuring customers that they were actually getting som...