Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

She and John had four children, but precisely because they’d done such an excellent job raising them, these had all moved away to do important things in big cities (it being the permanent, ongoing tragedy of Iowa that her well-brought-up young were obliged to flee the state in order to find employment worthy of their qualities).

THE FOOTBALL GAME did not exactly end but, like most of them, reached a point where it was simply unwatchable.

whatever Dad’s last will and testament said—however things were handled after his father’s eventual demise—he wasn’t going to be part of it. If he wanted to own land, he’d have to go out and find some. And it might be better and more beautiful land than the farm in Iowa could ever be, but it would never be the same; it would always be a place of exile.

“I know what you fucking told me,” Wallace said. “I was hoping that you were lying.” “Is this all just another ruse to find out whether or not I am lying?” “You’re just clever enough to be stupider than if you weren’t clever at all,” Wallace said.

“You’ve got the log entry?” For in the world of T’Rain, a little sparrow could not fall from its nest without the event being logged and time-stamped.

The brain, as far as Richard could determine from haphazard skimming of whatever came up on Google, was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn’t being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord’s private, improvised power network. As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain.

Once it was up and running, they could point to it and to its 100 percent success rate as vindicating the premise of APPIS, which was that real-world problems—especially problems that were difficult to solve because of hard-wired deficiencies of the human neurological system, such as the tendency to become bored when given a terrible job—could be tackled by metaphrasing them into Medieval Armed Combat scenarios, and then (here brandishing two searingly hip terms from high tech) putting them out on the cloud so that they could be crowdsourced.

The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.

The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.

And what he told the driver was that they were going to sit there for a while, possibly all night long, but that eventually a kid in a Manu jersey was going to emerge and then they were going to follow him.” “I’ve never heard of Manu Ginobili,” Zula said. “Is he really such a common cultural referent that—” “Yes,” said Peter and Csongor in unison.

“So, the two black sheep are visiting while Peter snowboards. Is that where everything went crazy?” “No. It’s where it started.” “How did it start?” “A man walked into the bar.” “Ah, yes. A lot of good stories start that way. Pray continue.”

Until now, the main thing driving her actions had been concern for Zula. And she was still very concerned about Zula. But that emotion had now been forced out by something much more intense and immediate, which was a desire to see every man aboard this vessel dead. Not even a desire, so much as an absolute nonnegotiable requirement. Her hands were not shaking with fear. This was rage.

Csongor remarked on the fact, which to him seemed odd, that in China some places were unbelievably crowded and others were totally uninhabited but there was no in between. Marlon thought it curious that anyone should find this remarkable. If a place was going to be inhabited, then it should be used as intensively as possible, and if it was a wild place, all sane persons would avoid it.

Pavel and Sergei couldn’t make sense of it for a few moments. Of course it was obviously an explosive vest. Yet to see one right there on a person’s body was so shocking that the mind couldn’t accept it at first. As if you had found Hitler in your kitchen.

But Yuxia had originally been drawn into this by nothing more than her desire to befriend some clueless Westerners she had observed wandering lost in the street. She had family back in Yongding, family who must be worried about her, and she must be asking herself now whether she would ever see them again. Even if she did, how could she explain certain things to them? The fight on the dock? The torture in the bucket of seawater? Aiming a pistol at Mohammed and trying to shoot him?

But whatever was out there did not move—did not think—like a human. It was at least as big as a human, though. It was circling this strange thicket that had appeared in its hunting grounds, sniffing at it, probing it with swipes of its paws. Discovering that it came apart rather easily. It was a bear—it could be nothing else—and it was homing in on the back of the truck, where Zula was.

she even permitted herself a brief excursion into meta/ironical land wondering if anyone else in the world—in history—had been in danger from gangsters, terrorists, and bears in the space of a single week. When would the pirates and dinosaurs show up?

ringing his doorbell, and his computer went to sleep,” said Seamus. “But in the meantime, the most powerful character in all of T’Rain is wandering around the world on autopilot.” “So what are you going to do?” Yuxia asked. “Maybe tag along. Like escorting a drunk president home after a long night in the bar.” “Didn’t you say you had to make a phone call?” “I have been trained by the United States government,” Seamus said, “to do more than one thing at a time.”

Each death meant that a particular set of ideas and perceptions and reactions was gone from the world, apparently forever, and served as a reminder to Richard that one day his ideas and perceptions and reactions would be gone too.

way round to the guest wing where Ershut did not seem to be. This was just a long straight hallway, aimed generally southward, lined with doors to guest rooms on both sides. Moving at the best jogging gait she could manage with the heavy pack on her back, she went straight to its end, punched out through the emergency exit there (fighting a ridiculous feeling of good-girl shame that it should never be used except in an actual emergency) and moved as directly as she could in the direction of the nearest cover:

The Fantastic Foreigners were also dumbfounded by the size and variety of the gun section, and in this way they lost another forty-five minutes to culture shock, pure and simple. Seamus could tell that Csongor was lusting after a 1911, but fortunately the paperwork would have made purchasing such a thing impossible, and so the relationship had to remain platonic for now.

But they’d made a conscious decision to turn their backs on all that. Like smokers or drinkers who’d gone straight, they were more dogmatic about this than anyone who’d come to that place naturally.