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Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason. —John Harington (16th century)
The caretaker is about sixty, the heavy burden of his years slowly crumpling him into an envelope of wheezing lassitude wrapped around a bloated core of abdominal discomfort.
I’m a mathematician with an interest in higher-dimensional topological deformations, and a recent career track that includes designing visualization systems for directed exploration of stochastic market movements with application to the Black–Scholes model – a weaponized banker, in other words.
Candidates include gamma ray bursters or asteroid impacts, or just the rarity of evolving opposable thumbs and fractional reserve banking.
In fact, once I’ve finished the course and have been certificated I’ll be entered in the books as a light tank for purposes of international arms control treaties.
the buildings hereabouts are so grotesque they’re not even fit for a slave barracks. All-Highest will have the architects responsible crucified in due course.
“They’re idiots,” Pete grumps. “Sorry. I mean they’re not idiots: they’re overworked, understaffed, under-budgeted, and their morale is in the pits, just like the rest of us. They’re mostly doing the best they can. But —”
Alex’s experience of dating is similar to his experience of string theory: abstract, intense, and entirely theoretical due to the absence of time and opportunities for probing such high-energy phenomena.
Then apply Stockholm syndrome proactively.” Lockhart twitches. “I do not think Stockholm syndrome means quite what you think it means.” “What, the tendency of people – usually women – in unfamiliar societies to enculturate rapidly?” Lockhart inclines his head. “Point.”
somehow he has internalized the ur-cultural narrative: you grow up, go to university, get a job, meet Ms. Right, get married, settle down, have kids, grow old together… it’s like some sort of checklist. Or maybe a list of epic quests you’ve got to complete while level-grinding in a game you’re not allowed to quit, with no respawns and no cheat codes.
Cassie is scheduled for a lecture at nine o’clock. She blows it off because life’s too short and anyway the world is going to end in about two weeks’ time, when the Second Heavy Cavalry Brigade rumbles into town accompanied by skies that rain wyrmfire and the death spells of combat magi.
“My hovercraft is full of eels,” Dad slurs,
His trainers were keen on drilling a particular outlook into Alex, and now he’s trying to apply it to his situation: observe, orient, decide, act.
“I don’t know, Brains, what are we going to do with a half-track full of guns?” Pinky asks. Brains chuckles. “Same thing we do every night, Pinky —” “Fort up and wait for reinforcements,” Pinky says flatly.
Very Bayesian, much uncertainty, wow.
Pete’s life flickers past his eyes like a spool of burning celluloid
where the bemused petrol station attendants come outside to gawp as if they’ve never seen a convoy of tanks queuing for diesel before.
Then Scampton notifies EUROCONTROL that the RAF have lost a fighter in air-to-air combat, and within an hour European airspace closes down from Ireland to Warsaw.
Ammunition will arrive separately from one of the Defense Munition Centers in Warwickshire,
any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology, he tells himself.
Some of them look almost normal, if etiolate otherkin wearing Spock-ears and steel armor can be described as normal.
hereby declare that I, and all my people, are refugees under the terms of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. We cannot return to our home because we have a well-founded fear of being destroyed by the Dead Gods from beyond the ends of the universe that have returned to feed on this and other worlds.
