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Kumiko had smiled then, her own smile, breaking the funeral mask, and for this her guilt was driven instantly, more deeply and still more sharply, into that place in her heart where she knew her shame and her unworthiness.
an unmanned Eurotrans freight vehicle, its blunt prow studded with sensors and banks of headlights.
They wore the expression men always wore when they watched you dance, staring real hard but locked up inside themselves at the same time, so their eyes told you nothing at all and their faces, in spite of the sweat, might have been carved from something that only looked like flesh.
And she’d gotten into watching them, when they lost it. That was the interesting part, because they really did lose it, they were totally helpless, maybe just for a split second, but it was like they weren’t even there.
Slick didn’t understand what it was that Gentry was trying to do, but he envied Gentry the narrowness of his obsession.
As he watched her, he saw there was no wasted motion, and she didn’t seem to have to think about what she was doing.
the vest and jacket mismatched, herringbone and houndstooth, but everything woven from the same wool, and that, probably, from the same sheep on the same hillside, the whole look orchestrated in London, by committee, in a room above a Floral Street shop he’d never seen.
Continuity was writing a book. Robin Lanier had told her about it. She’d asked what it was about. It wasn’t like that, he’d said. It looped back into itself and constantly mutated; Continuity was always writing it. She asked why. But Robin had already lost interest: because Continuity was an AI, and AIs did things like that.
From the other side of the square, the evangelist opened up at full volume, in mid-rant, like he’d warmed up to a spit-spraying fury before he’d cut the amp in, the hologram Jesus shaking its white-robed arms and gesturing angrily to the sky, the mall, the sky again. Rapture, he said. Rapture’s coming.
those mirrors had frames on them that were solid gold, carved with leaves and angels. The writing across the bottom would say where it was, maybe, but Mona couldn’t read. Anyway, there weren’t any fucking roaches there, she was sure of that,
long high-walled space of a truck trailer up on blocks. There were windows cut down one side, square holes sealed over with scratched plastic.
Came down here on the train, she thought, New York to Atlanta and then you change.
“Kuromaku,”
The word meant black curtain. “It’s from Kabuki, but it means a fixer, someone who sells favors. Means behind-the-scenes,
Sarakin!”
Japanese word for "money lender"
Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form. Not that that was the weirdest idea Slick had ever run across, but Gentry had this obsessive conviction that the Shape mattered totally. The apprehension of the Shape was Gentry’s grail.
like a very old tool still in hard daily use.
He could remember every step of the Judge’s construction, if he wanted to, and sometimes he did, just for the comfort of being able to.
past all the good things you could have if you just got lucky.
Having completed the Usher, Piper was zipping her board into a fitted nylon case.
the loa Beauvoir credited with almost infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter the flow of data as it was obtained by the scanners, rendering the vévés transparent.…
Like watching myths take root in a parking lot.
a secret halo flashing her just the signal she wanted to read.
Pretty soon the crash would come on, and before then she’d have to figure out a way to get back to the hotel, and suddenly it seemed like everything was too complicated, too many things to do, angles to figure, and that was the crash, when you had to start worrying about putting the day side together again.
Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow. It’s called money, Lanette said. It’s called money. You just slip it in.
he feared that intimacy would undermine the illusion their stims projected so perfectly.
aleph-class biosoft,
There was something vampiric about the room, she decided, something it would have in common with millions of similar rooms, as though its bewilderingly seamless anonymity were sucking away her personality,
whole blocks in ruin, unglazed windows gaping above sidewalks heaped with trash.
with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.
Lanette had a lot of stories about weird kinks. She said suits were the weirdest of all, the big suits way up in big companies, because they couldn’t afford to lose control when they were working. But when they weren’t working, Lanette said, they could afford to lose it any way they wanted.
What he’s got is an abstract of the sum total of data constituting cyberspace.
the evolution of machine intelligence: stone circles, clocks, steam-driven looms, a clicking brass forest of pawls and escapements, vacuum caught in blown glass, electronic hearthglow through hairfine filaments, vast arrays of tubes and switches, decoding messages encrypted by other machines.… The fragile, short-lived tubes compact themselves, become transistors; circuits integrate, compact themselves into silicon.… Silicon approaches certain functional limits—
to face his own limits, to distinguish ambition from talent.
The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.
she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows of heroes and villains whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residual images have long since been woven through the global culture.
