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“Next Generation Projection,”
“Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System,”
“Artificial intelligence, counterinsurgency software, United States military, twenty-teens, highly classified.”
lots of people happier with a dumbfuck in the White House.
“OPA?” “Open-plan anxiety. That’s for your shoes, there.” Indicating a translucent tray Verity assumed was from Muji. “What do you use it for?” Verity asked. “Naps. Get in.”
“The result of hybridization of two lines of military research. One toward uploading aspects of human consciousness, the other toward an expert system focused on a particular sort of warfare.
Muji bag
noetic agent,
“Construals. The left brain attempting to impose recognizable attributes on randomness.
“Dysmorphia?” Eyes still closed, wondering if she were beginning to experience construals. “The specific symptoms mimic postural hypotension,” Rainey said. “Dizziness on standing, possibility of fainting.”
“My mother told me about you,” Netherton said, surprising himself, “when I was a small child. Not you specifically, but a figure in a story, benevolent but frightening. She called that figure the Adjustor. Adjustor of destinies, she said, for those who threatened the stability of the klept.
But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal shortsightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.”
“Do you know Guilherme?” he asked. Verity blinked. Hearing Stets mention the Manzilian felt like a category error, as if the moon were to inquire after the cantaloupe you’d bought the day before, both being spherical. “Not to speak to. I’ve seen him at the apartment.”
Honda EM5000 electric-start generators, power in case someone cuts ours tonight when we most need it.
tabula rasa.
The City,
a unique species of semi-autonomous crypto-state, the single least democratic element of elected British government. It was this singular status, according to Lowbeer, that had allowed it to ride out the eventual collapse of democracy. That, and its core expertise in laundering money, had brought it into a mutually beneficial synergy with the émigré oligarch community, dominated by Russians, who had themselves first been attracted to London by the City’s meta-criminal financial arcana, plus the lavish culture of personal amenities for those requiring same.
Grim Tim
“Klept. What runs the world that isn’t China, up the line where Lowbeer is. Hereditary authoritarian government, roots in organized crime. The jackpot seemed to filter that out of what was already happening, made it dominant.”
couch-surfing,
“Cross-continual nuclear anxiety,”
“The Black Shark,”
Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can’t stop stealing.
author of Count Zero, Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral.
