Make it personal.
Machine idiolect. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated they get, they still end up sounding like a playgroup learning box. I sighed and looked directly ahead at the slice-of-virtual-life holos on the w...
Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative—which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys—but they weren’t any kind of pushover, either. We’d all develo...
Kristin, nothing ever does change. I jerked a thumb back at the crowd outside. You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves. You’ll...
I’ve heard that said about outlanders and enemies before, and I don’t generally trust it. Just too bloody convenient, the quick and easy way to deal with difference. Oh, they’re not like us, they’re i...
It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.
I remembered the way Reileen Kawahara had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to me in dreams for a long time afterwards. Reileen’s argument, framed as she pee...
I imagine they're pretty much insane by now. Can't be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you're fighting tooth and nail for your life in a...
His lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town.
And he remembered then where he was, remembered how he'd come to be there, the years it had taken, and last of all he remembered he was old.
Who knows how the data behind these metaphors has traveled, from where and for how long.
About the blood; it isn’t yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don’t worry about wounds; check your func...
You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have.
You’d think they’d develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You’d think they wouldn’t fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn’t deploy weaponry that woul...
You know what you stupid fucking conspiracy assholes just don’t get? No one is that well organized.
Was a time... Sure. And there was another fucking time the summers never seemed to end and you'd never paid for it in your life. Remember that? Time passes, Max - get over it. Skip the fucking nostalg...
They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.
There isn’t actually any escape. Once you understand this, you are empowered.
The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywo...
The police are more impressive by night. First of all, you’ve got the flashing lights casting dramatic color into everyone’s faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue.