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I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. —H. G. WELLS
More like the blade of a chisel, but hawk-billed. Where the back of an axe would’ve been flat, like the face of a hammer, it was spiked, like a miniature of the blade but curved the other way. Either one thick as your little finger, but ground to edges you wouldn’t feel as you cut yourself. Handle was graceful, a little recurved, the wood soaked in something that made it tougher, springy. The maker had a forge in Tennessee, and everyone in Haptic Recon 1 got one. It looked used.
She’d gotten to feeling that what the accountant most liked, about killing them, was that it really cost them. Not just that he was better at it than they were, but that it actually hurt them to lose. People on her squad were feeding their children with what they earned playing, and maybe that was all they had, like she was paying Pharma Jon for her mother’s prescriptions. Now he’d gone and done it again, killed everyone on her squad, one after another, taking his time, enjoying it. He was hunting her now, while she circled, alone, deeper into that French forest and the flying snow.
“Somersaulting,
window defrosted.” “Depolarized.”
her make eye contact, laugh. Did another perimeter. They were at the window, when I got back.” “Who?”
Making thermoplastic sheaths and holsters was a hobby of theirs, like macramé or quilting.
Netherton had never had any sense of Gordon and Tyenna being anything more than existentially creepy, and in any case he’d assumed they were behaviorally modified.
A policewoman, State, in a white paper hazmat suit, half unzipped, was standing in the middle of Porter, eating a pulled-pork sandwich. Flynne liked her haircut. Wondered if Tommy did. Then she wondered where you got a pulled-pork sandwich, this time of night.
Corbell’s getting his.” “No way. I’d have heard before now.” “Thing is, you don’t know your family and friends have all been taking care
door?” “A garage,” said Ash. “Housing a collection of historic vehicles.”
“Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”
No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.
hers are
“Opportunities to do very badly were manifold. You avoided them. The major part in any success.”
Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.
That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.
