Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more.

Since they’d chosen gene therapy, why be half-hearted about it? Why rescue their child from maladjustment, only to curse it with mediocrity

An interminable ad for the Department of Defence was showing, all rousing music and jet fighters in appealingly symmetrical formations. The latest privatisation legislation meant that each taxpayer could specify the precise allocation of his or her income tax between government departments, who in turn were free to spend as much of their revenue as they wished on advertising aimed at attracting more funds. Defence was doing well. Social Security was laying off staff.

"!ah-ah! fake laugh. hiding real pain"

I learnt that a neural net is a device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to be understood.

Freak shows are like that; everybody wants to watch, but nobody wants to join.

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit – preferably around the sun. I don’t care how much it costs, just so long as I don’t end up part of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

even believers in a glorious afterlife have been known to struggle hard to postpone the trip.

Have you ever done something so wrong that it dragged your whole life down into a choking black swamp in a sunless land of nightmares? Have you ever made a choice so foolish that it cancelled out, in one blow, everything good you might ever have done, made void every memory of happiness, made everything in the world that was beautiful, ugly, turned every last trace of self-respect into the certain knowledge that you should never have been born?

My emotional geography is very carefully arranged;

After all, many publishers used computer programs – highly specialised, but unsophisticated algorithms, without the remotest possibility of self-awareness – to routinely produce both literature, and literary criticism, indistinguishable from the human product. Not just formularised garbage, either; on several occasions, I’d been deeply affected by works which I’d later discovered had been cranked out by unthinking software.

Wrirten in 94

self-deception is only an easy choice if you make it in time.

‘I’ll build my church on sand. And I’ll ask no one to follow me – and yet, you will. You all will.’