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The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand.
But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension—you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.”
Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves.
That’s how you fight wars, after all—with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.
The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far
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“Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated.
like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.
Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.
The police are more impressive by night.
“The human eye is a wonderful device,” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”
The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?”
“There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”
The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished, and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell—and heaven—on earth.
You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ’cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”
What is offered. Sometimes. Enough.
What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever.
Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.
For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.
A good lie should shadow the truth closely enough to draw substance from it,
And despite it all, there was space for this measure of quiet. Take what is offered, and that must sometimes be enough.
Military training takes the natural order and fucks with it. It breaks down any resistance to psychopathic behavior at the same time as it builds fanatical loyalties to the group.
I could have lied, I could have reasoned. It all would have meant about the same, because the reality was pain, and right now there was nothing anyone could do to take it away. I said nothing.
Empty-handed combat has only two rules. Get in as many blows, as hard and as fast as you can, and put your opponent down. When he’s on the ground, you kill him. If there are other rules or considerations, it isn’t a real fight, it’s a game.
and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung heap of history. For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.
“Sometimes, it helps to externalize things. Even if you talk to someone else about it, you’re usually talking to yourself. The other guy’s just providing a sounding board. You talk it out.”
We’re not dealt in, we’re thrown in, and after that it’s just about keeping your head above water.”
