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When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn’t do what he liked.
“You never learned the secret,” said Roberta. “How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn’t think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They’re all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you’ve chosen to torture all of us instead. That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can’t stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It’s like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It’s nothing personal.”
Problem solving and troubleshooting were a source of pleasure for both of them, and narrating the process was the next best thing to doing it. The same neural pathways lit up when you talked your way through the maze as when you actually solved it. Except this time, you were bathed in the glow of having already unraveled the thing.
Laurence had a conviction, in his loins, that he deserved to be dumped. Because he took Serafina for granted, while he was working fourteen-hour days on the Project, or because she was too excellent for him. But the whole point of being a grown-up and an uber-hacker is that you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you can get.
“I mean, we’re grown-ups now. Allegedly. And we feel things less than we did when we were kids, because we’ve grown so much scar tissue, or our senses have dulled. I think it’s probably healthy. I mean, little kids don’t have to make decisions, unless something’s very wrong. Maybe you can’t make up your mind as easily, if you feel too much.
I think ethics are universal, and derived from principles, and I think that situational ethics are a slippery slope.
I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that’s always going to depend on who you’re dealing with.
They were, all of them, standing on terra incognita, and this felt like a moment that was radically discontinuous with everything that had come before.
Fucking madrigals. Was there a more repulsive trend, in the entire universe? Trust hipsters to make even the collapse of civilization unbearably twee. These were the advertising jingles of the Renaissance, written by wife killers and creepy stalkers.
Peregrine had amazing access to data and processing power. And what had it done? Set itself up as a dating service.
“But don’t you get that romance is an essentially bourgeois contrivance? At best, it’s anachronistic. At worst, it’s a distraction, a luxury for people who aren’t preoccupied with survival.
He was sure he was visibly shaking, and you could smell the terror on him. He tried to reach for the outrage that he had been so full of not long ago. Why was outrage only available when useless?
