Bandwidth (Analog #1)

by Eliot Peper

detritus

Sean gave him a searching look. “I’ve been meaning to say something for years, but somehow just never found the right time. Then something like this happens, and you realize that the ‘right time’ is something you create, not something you wait on.”

You must forgive my curiosity about what’s going on inside the soul of a man who returns to the country of his parents’ passing to petition on behalf of the very cause that contributed to their demise.

“It’s one thing to accept what you’ve done to me,” he said, “but it’s something else entirely to ask me to turn around and do it to someone I care about.” “Humanity is more important than any one person,” she said. “No,” he said. “How we treat people defines humanity.”

Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers, while those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine. So this was how it felt to discover the difference. But the Island went further than controlling the current—they reached in to tweak the feel of the water on the swimmer’s skin, the ache in their lungs, their choice of stroke.

insouciance

panopticon.

Democracy was a messy business. Ugly, tired, and slow, it promised nothing but incremental change guaranteed to disappoint everyone. He understood what drove the Island crew. They were subverting a system they saw as fundamentally broken. But having seen the world through the lens of their engineered omniscience, Dag would take the frustrations of cooperation over the predations of coercion.

Critical thinking without hope was cynicism, while hope without critical thinking was naïveté.

He remembered staring at himself down the barrel of the Tavor. Your feed was a mirror that reflected back your accumulated dreams, fears, whims, passions, and very identity. The Island subtly altered the reflection every time you glanced at it, until you no longer recognized yourself.

leviathans

Otherwise, someone willing to do so would topple you in no time at all. Winners didn’t stay winners by staying cooped up in a fortress. They stuck their necks out so far that everyone else thought it was a bluff.

sky. Understanding how things came to be frees us to imagine new possibilities.

tumescence