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Belisarius fed his marks the clues they needed to turn their greed into expensive mistakes.
Anywhere money flowed, someone would try to siphon off some of it.
The magnetic organelles in his cells felt the unevenness of the electrical currents in the neighborhood,
He reached a squat brick building of sintered regolith growing into the ice-enclosed tunnels of Bob Town,
“The right people say that you get impossible things done.”
His restless brain gnawed on all sorts of problems he didn’t want it touching whenever he didn’t give it enough to do.
Like bets in a card game, some conversations needed to be waited out.
They dreamed of a war of independence, and no one spoiled for a war they didn’t think they could win.
And he didn’t doubt that if he tried and failed, Major Iekanjika would consider it an efficient use of her time to put a bullet in his brain.
Of course some camera must be watching him. The paranoia of the Union was as palpable as their passion.
A con man called Gander had once taught him that there were only three bets. Sometimes, you play the cards. Sometimes, you play the player. Sometimes, you just throw the dice.
How could he quantify the effect? There ought to be an algebra for societies. He should make one.
The multiplication of emotional and patriotic energy produced psychological momentum.
Military-grade fission-propelled missiles could sustain forty gravities of acceleration and still hit evasive targets.
Math was comfortingly inescapable.
So much social geography became overgrown and impenetrable in savant.
What did it mean when a single electron could pass through two slits at once? Reality at the atomic level was slippery.
The Homo quantus project was born when it was discovered that consciousness was the element that collapsed quantum systems into clear outcomes.
Superposition and overlapping probabilities disappeared whenever humans came close.
Consciousness turned probability into reality. The goal of the Homo quantus project had been to engineer humans capable of discarding their consciousness and subjectivity so as not to collapse quantum phenomena.
to cease to be a subject capable of experiencing.
could a line of probability connecting entangled particles accurately guide an induced wormhole to a precise destination?
The nuclei of the entangled particles in the pin also rotated, sending an instantaneous signal along the filament of probability to their entangled counterparts a third of a light year away.
The Lanoix probably had more Faraday cages built into its walls than an Anglo-Spanish Bank.
Cards possessed a kind of purity. The apparent evenness of the probability was platonically untouchable.
As intelligence was an emergent property of life, so games of controlled chance were an emergent property of intelligence. Intellect was an adaptive evolutionary structure, allowing humanity not only to sense the world in space, but to predict future events through time. Games of chance tested that predictive machine—so much so that games of controlled chance discriminated consciousness from unconsciousness far better than Turing.
And she didn’t understand what Bel was doing. She understood the facts individually, but not in relation to each other.
He has a purpose. Machines are the clue. God already made his promise to the people of Moses and offered His Son to humanity, but the world has become much larger. Many machines have become intelligent, and who’s to know whether they have souls, unless we test it?
Imagine if humanity was just scaffolding for the creation and ensoulment of machines.”
“I’ve found out how to move past my instincts, as all rational beings must.”
All things considered, humans had done a terrible job of directing their own evolution.
The Homo quantus lived in those infinite spaces, dreamed in that emptiness, where the quantum world frothed without observers. It was a lonely home—not because they were alone, but because in those spaces, they themselves became no one at all.
“You can’t offer to diminish me and call it more, Bel.”
You and Cassandra have a past and you’re both weird and intense in the same way.
“This isn’t even needed for the mission,” Belisarius said. “I have hobbies.
What separated intelligence from information was assessment.
You can’t raise a child or an animal cruelly and then be surprised when they turn dangerous.”
But her brain was not her heart, and Occam’s Razor suggested that if Bel was lying to six, he was lying to seven.
Congregate political commissars shouldn’t be embedded in our government. We should bleed in our own wars, not theirs.
Human history was a concatenation of power struggles and people trying to get away with whatever they could, until someone strong enough came along to stop them.
Some theorize that the creation of flawed Puppets imposes an arrow of time onto the cosmos, from imperfect creation to the eventual attainment of moral perfection.
“Theology is the queen of the sciences. It permeates every part of Puppet existence.”
Her fingers worked at the fear that had crept into his muscles.
She didn’t often get to see the stars through a single layer of glass.
His joints ached like someone had injected steel flakes into them.
The world made a lot of sense when it was clear that the people giving the orders couldn’t find their asses any better than the mongrels could.
Their grandchildren and descendants had paid for their crimes. It was stomach-turning.
Feelings were a raw storm of biting acid and fiery exhilaration.
Beside him was a quantum perceptional and computational array, nested knots of processing algorithms without the subjectivity to collapse a wave function, a thing capable of seeing overlapping quantum possibilities and probabilities in their beautiful simultaneity, but not a creature that, like him, could feel lonely or helpless.
Intelligence was the first sense to see through time instead of space.
