Kindle Notes & Highlights
An eerie, fuzzy whisper that tittered in the background, emanating from an unidentified source like rats running the conduits.
Ooljee’s fiddling with a Mandlebrot Set derived from the Kettrick sandpainting had inexplicably generated some kind of reproduction program within the police mollysphere. That was physics, not phantasy.
No one was checking idents now.
gawping
and left the remainder smoking like fried fish bones.
steady, hard, and cold as an iceman’s tattoo.
said to function as a spiritual deus ex machina,
told them how to use powered rock to make sandpaintings.
photic
The sunlight here was possessed of a penetrating harshness that was as much to be avoided as sought after.
yeis
Right then reality was a state of mind dearly to be desired.
In order for the chant to work, the supplicant was required to actually sit on the painting and in that way to become part of it.
Their straight-line mouths did not comment. Their unfathomable dark eyes did not mock.
lugubrious
The colors were an in vivo physicality, washing away the dullness of his life, cleansing, invigorating, life-affirming.
Was it another reality or just a hole in this one?
boojum’s
lambent
though I have yet to hear of anyone digging optical disks or mollyspheres out of the floor of a cliff dwelling.
“It’s a database,”
Tension was draining out of him all at once, thick and heavy, like oil from an old car.
We haven’t a roach in
shitpile’s idea of how big this thing is.”
Soon they were cruising at high speed through Ganado’s eastern suburbs, where expensive residences chipped away at tree-shrouded hillsides and people paid fortunes for unobstructed views of the offices and factories they couldn’t wait to abandon during the day.
cerulean
A system simple to direct is also easy to misdirect. One must progress carefully, in modest increments.”
Like any good tool, it waits to be instructed, to be told what to do.”
“You apply your values to the immense unknown.”
truly alien would by its very definition be incomprehensible to us.
So might it be with their devices, their tools.
his obvious interest belied the attempt. “The ants come out, my friends. The ants come out for a look around.
“The hard part is not making use of the tools, my friends. It is recognizing that they exist at all.
“So basically what y’all are saying is that this web is somebody else’s garbage?”
was standard prisoner modus for trying to reassert rapidly disappearing independence.
away from the sterile mask that was Gaggii’s house.
creature, a tenebrous serpentine program dredged from the depths of some hatathli’s thousand-year-dead imagination, a realized representation of old legends.
The snake thing struck repeatedly at the truck’s cab, attacking effortlessly, a mad manic mass of pulsating serpentine energy.
but the cab and engine compartment had melted like a chunk of pork fat in a pot of greens.
He hit back at us with technology, Paul. Not metaphysics or spiritualism.”
Tell me that the cutting edge of modern science does not sound more like something out of a sandpainting than a textbook.
“Where lies the line between sorcery and science?
It is only a matter of terminology, my friend.
Buried somewhere within that rare earth-doped fiber-optic mass were the answers to his questions.
She had a man’s handshake, not some flighty caress-and-pass like a pair of railroad cars uncoupling.
syndetic
The sky here was big and bright enough to swallow a man’s worst fears.
for this was the land where the earth rusted.
Worry was a waste of time anyway. It broke down proteins in the body.
chiastic
