Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There’s this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn’t quite sharp enough anymore, a waxing a...
There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.
The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished, and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies...
The car boosted up and presumably out because I heard the drumming of rain against the bodywork. There was a faint smell of leather from the upholstery, which beat the odour of faeces on the inbound j...
Something’s not right. Without applying rationale as a mediator, select your first impulse. What would it be?
Rich people do this. They have the power and they see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom, plea...
Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one.
Like all lotteries, it was an attempt to distract and dilute labor force discontent with irrational hope.
It’ll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that’s always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can’t get by on past models, you have to keep m...
Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth.
In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.
If I know anything about stack engineers, they'll weld down the lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone.
I was young and stupid, I said simply. I was used. I killed for people like you because I knew no better. Then I learned better. What happened at Innenin taught me better. Now I don’t kill for anyone...
I shook my head. I don’t have the energy to hate the corporates, Hand. Where would I start? And like Quell says, Rip open the diseased heart of a corporation and what spills out?People.That’s right. P...
I mean. She wasn’t listening to him, didn’t look at him. Her hand went on clenching and unclenching, making loose, gentle fists in the air one after the other. If the Chinese or maybe the Indians had...
Forget uniforms or nominal allegiances—if it wears a weapon and scars, it’s no safer than the next starving wild dog. Feed and water with care, walk like you’re carrying dragon eggs, and never, never...
Common men make a distinction between gods and demons, Poltar, but it's ignorance to talk that way. When the powers do our will, we worship them as gods; when they thwart and frustrate us, we hate and...
But I won’t watch them go to war again. I’ve been to war, you know, to save civilization from the reptile hordes. I bled for it, I saw friends and other men die for it. And then I watched men like you...
Bullet-proof, right?’ ‘Mmm.’ Kawahara tipped her head to one side. ‘Depends on the bullet, I would say. But impact resistant, certainly.
An-Kirilnar is. The Helmsman stopped dead, so abruptly that it took her a moment to realize there were no more words coming. Flicker of shifting light across the optics, there and gone. But this time...