Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

Richard’s ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn’t enjoy that last cigarette.

“De gustibus non est disputandum.”

“Fucking rude of me, ain’t it?” Wallace said, looking her hard in the eye. “But for us to solve this problem we need to trust each other and to focus, and you kids nowadays substitute communicating for thinking, don’t you? So let’s think.”

The brains of people who did unbelievably boring shit for a living showed dark patches in the zones responsible for job-related processes, since all those almost-never-exercised neurons got pulled down and trucked somewhere else and used to beef up the circuits used to keep track of NCAA tournament brackets and celebrity makeovers.

awe and horror had struggled for supremacy in his mammalian brain as his reptilian had begun to tally all exits, conventional and un-, from the bar; lubricated his whole body with sweat; and jacked his pulse rate up into a frequency range that had probably jammed Mounties’ radar guns out on Highway 22.

The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.

were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr’s heaven.

Sokolov pulled the edges of the tarp inward and got his weight on them so that his shelter could not be stripped off by a velleity of the wind

They now spent what felt like an hour creeping across the minefield. “Mines very old,” Sokolov mentioned, after a while. “Oh good,” she said. “No, bad. More dangerous.” So much for conversation.

This man—Sharjeel was apparently his name—looked, dressed, and acted like a Westernized grad student or high-tech employee. Watching him, Zula could only think of all the nonterrorist South Asians, happily assimilated into North American society, for whom an asshole like Sharjeel was their worst nightmare.

“Is dangerous, I know, to take ride from strangers. With assault rifle in backpack, not so dangerous.”