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stalk your prey from the direction they’re most blind: below or downstream.
She was lucky enough to have the genes that kept the tiny parasites at bay, but she wasn’t totally immune.
Not Blood type O got future reference.
It was a plausible theory and an omen for what was to come. In 1926, the Great Miami Hurricane tore across the state and killed nearly three hundred people around Lake Okeechobee. Two years later, in 1928, another hurricane hit the region and killed almost three thousand people, making it the worst natural disaster in Florida history.
For Sloan, the irony was that this drug-fueled construction project was just south of the city of Saint Augustine—the location of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. It felt like a five-hundred-year regression.
Half the projectiles Wind Aerospace hardware shot into the sky were indirectly paid for by support packages the United States provided to countries that helped launch them. The extra-cynical part of him sometimes wondered if that was the goal.
It sounds as though there were near surface rumors of what DOGE found for some time.
like any other human endeavor, law enforcement was limited by people and money.
nexus,”
“It’s more than a metaphor.
Every place has them,” said Theo. “It could be a red light district, a spot under a bridge where homeless end up congregating. Sometimes it’s a restaurant or just a street corner. Another term is a ‘strange attractor.’ There can be physical reasons why they occur, or psychological ones.
even smart people could be fooled, and saying what you really thought could get you into trouble in the wrong circles.
Some scientists suggest our heads aren’t really where our minds are located. All that gray matter is just an antenna for picking up consciousness.
only make people who annoy me call me ‘Doctor’—which generally only includes administrators with doctorates of education.
Sloan nodded. “It was kind of similar in my family. Except instead of magic books it was maybe sneaking into Cuban territorial waters to look for shipwrecks. My dad’s justification was they were communists so you really couldn’t steal from them.”
“We all have some degree of disassociation with the voice in our head. It’s why we call ourselves stupid out loud or criticize ourselves mentally.
Human brains have unevenly evolved over the last few hundred years. They don’t work as perfectly or as logically as we would like. We have to improvise. Being social primates who gained a survival advantage through cooperation, we’re hardwired to care what others think—even to the point where a simulacrum of another person, whether it’s a voice in our head or a cartoon mascot for a language app, can motivate us.”
“We got the Unabomber nailed down,” said Holloway. “Douglas was close, then another FBI team became convinced he was a blue-collar airplane mechanic and ignored the connection to academia. The FBI then spent weeks looking for a white guy and a box truck in the Beltway Sniper case and it turned out to be a Black man and a teenager driving around in a Caprice.
People overlook the minor signs only to find out that they’ve been in the presence of a monster all along.
Tomlinson’s a favorite, and I don’t think they wanted to look at him that way. And I don’t want to be harsh towards Ms. Grace, but some teachers and guidance counselors, administrators, they treat you differently if you’re popular than if you’re not.
“What are we looking for?” “I don’t know,” Theo replied.
it’s only recently that you could do most scientific studies relatively out in the open.”
“We’re funding what any sensible person would consider bioweapons research in the labs of what you and I would consider the enemy.
“Here’s the thing the conspiracy theorists don’t understand. There’s not one big giant conspiracy.” He took a sip of his beer and continued. “Just hundreds of tiny ones.”
For Jackie, her social life didn’t begin and end with the school bell or whatever team event or activity they were doing.
it’s sort of amazing to me that there’s this universe out in front of us and then this universe inside our head.
“If you walk into a library and really think about it, it’s not empty. There are thousands of people waiting to speak to you.
Mental blocks might seem far-fetched, but Jessica knew that everyone had them—some
we like to say everybody’s the same inside, and that’s just not true—that’s
“I’ll tell you the real secret: The wizard was inside of us all along. I call mine ‘Mr. Whisper.’”
said Sloan. “There aren’t any listings. Apparently, one of the provisions is land has to be sold privately, and purchases are to be approved by the island homeowner association,” said Jessica. “That’s become pretty common in some of the smaller tourist locations that are afraid of being taken over by outsiders.” “Most of my suspects tend to live in the suburbs or mansions. This is new for me.” “Mine tend to prefer compounds or extreme remote locations,” said Jessica. “A place like this could be the perfect location to hide, if you think about it. Ted Kaczynski was off in the middle of the
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As far as he was concerned, all that mattered was having ample desk space for his computers, monitors, equipment, and projects. Anything else was incidental.
“I’m sure to someone who had never seen a scalpel before, a surgeon seemed indistinguishable from Jack the Ripper,” Keating told her.
Trope
“From what I understand, after a few days, the mind begins to break down. Longer than that, you just have a gibbering idiot,” said Theo. “We certainly do tend to fall apart without stimulation,”
“After the sensory input stops, pattern recognition begins to break, but in some individuals, their brain learns new patterns—the beating of the heart, the pulse, even theta waves. Upon that, a certain kind of mind can construct its own reality. And that’s where it gets really interesting.
