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The sinners in the Christian version of hell could at least remember why they were burning in eternal fire, but these poor dumb Greeks could only suffer without knowing why;
The coffee was unutterably fantastic. The machine cost more than Richard’s first car and there was nothing known to coffee technology that was not embodied in its hardware and its algorithms.
In the Greek version, Clotho was the spinner—the creator of these threads. Lachesis was the measurer. So that would be your snooze button right there—she had her nine-minute tape measure out the whole time Dodge was lying in bed. And Atropos was the cutter.
The engineer—a new hire named Corvallis Kawasaki—had footnoted his own remarks by mentioning that the mirrored-ball problem reached at least as far back as the German genius and polymath G. W. Leibniz, who had written of it as a way of thinking about monads.
This guy had noticed, some years ago, that all inexpensive horror movies used the same piece of music—Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—in their soundtracks. That opus had become a cliché, more apt to induce groans or laughs than horror.
I’m talking about Ephrata Cryonics Inc. The cold storage place
Basically—according to what was written about him—El Shepherd intended to live forever, and so he didn’t like to place himself in situations where his brain could be destroyed. He had a mobile office, built into a bus, which he preferred over airplane travel. Buses could crash, of course, but unless you T-boned a gasoline tanker at a hundred miles an hour, the destruction probably wouldn’t rise to the level that would completely destroy the brain. Whereas the crash of a jet airplane could leave nothing behind for rescuers to scrape up and put into the freezer.
If you were a member of the reality-based community who suspected that it was a hoax, you had to wade through a hundred zombie-related postings in order to find one that made sense,
He shrugged. “It happens. That’s what angels are actually doing, you know. Paying people like you to try a bunch of stuff. To see what works. You can always move on.”
“After my friend died,” he said, “and I got over the shock, you know what happened? Like, around the time of the funeral?” “You got inappropriately horny and felt like fucking everything that moved?” “Yeah, has that ever happened to you?” “Yeah. When my dad died. When my company died. And now,” she said.
“I’ll give you that much,” Corvallis said. “Writing a name on a title page is easy. Forging a whole document written in a consistent hand is hard.” “It is damn near unforgeable evidence that one specific person wrote the whole manuscript. That’s what a holograph is—it’s what the word denoted before it came to be used to mean three-D image technology.” “So ‘holography’—the H in ‘PURDAH’—is shorthand for ‘creating documents that are provably traceable to a given author.’”
“And just like a holograph doesn’t need the author’s name on the title page—” “Anonymous Holography,” Pluto reminded him, with a satisfied nod. “Run the whole thing by me again?” “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”
So I can totally see why El or anyone with a shred of crypto knowledge would want to just burn it down. To make it so that no one would ever trust it again.
Surrounding traffic was at least 95 percent robo-piloted, and giving their little caravan a wide berth since you never knew what a human-piloted car was going to do.
Having caught his eye, she panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn’t Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level.
“One of your rellies?” Phil inquired. Just making polite conversation since the new arrival’s privacy settings were so tatterdemalion that Phil could have traced Pete Borglund’s mitochondrial DNA back to the Rift Valley with a few gestures.
she wondered about the way of thinking that held this one particular era of the house’s history to be somehow canonical: the logical end state to which it ought to be returned and in which it then ought to be preserved by the flawed machine of Richard Forthrast’s last will and testament.
All traces of Richard, or for that matter of Patricia or John or anyone else, had been expunged from the house. All of the history had been erased in Karen’s earnest efforts to make the house historical.
“Richard’s will basically said, ‘Create two things: a foundation and a trust. Put some of my money into the foundation and use it to do cool stuff. Put the rest of it into the trust, which is there to provide a safety net for my extended family—so I don’t have any grandnephews who can’t afford to go to college or get medical care or whatever. Set up the trust so that the money is divided per stirpes among my generation.’
“But each person out there”—Enoch did the thing with his chin again—“is getting their own personalized stream of algorithmically generated alternate reality that is locked in a feedback loop with their pulse, blink rate, and so on. You’re not going to get very far trying to get one of those people to tear his attention away from that so that you can relate a story about some guy two thousand years ago feeding a large number of people with a few loaves and fishes.”
“So, that’s fractals in a nutshell right there,” Julian said. “The point being that the length of the crack—” “—and hence of Zelrijk-Aalberg’s border—” Enoch added. “—doesn’t actually have any one fixed value that can be known. The result of the measurement will depend on the resolution of the measuring device used.”
“Suppose all of that comes to pass, Sophia, and you get that job and embark on that career. Twenty years from now, how will you know if you have succeeded?”
“What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?” Enoch asked. He seemed a little amused by the question. Not in a condescending way. More charmed.
Some of the “guards” were just algorithms, analyzing video and audio feeds for suspicious behavior, recognizing faces and cross-checking them against a whitelist of residents, friends, and neighbors, and a blacklist of predators, stalkers, and ex-husbands. Anything ambiguous was forwarded to a Southeast Asian eyeball farm.
It was all completely optional and unnecessary, which was part of the point; most people didn’t know or care about any of this and simply did things openly under their own names. But it was easy, and free, and recommended, that when you were starting out in life you establish at least one PURDAH, so that you could begin compiling a record of things that you had done. You could link it to your actual legal name and face if you wanted, or not. And either way you could punch it into your VEIL system so that as you walked down the street, computer vision systems, even though they couldn’t
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“Listen,” Enoch said, “there is a long and honorable history, dating back to the Royal Society, of the gentleman scientist. And now the lady scientist. We don’t like to acknowledge it because we wish to maintain a polite facade of egalitarianism. But there’s a reason why so many important theorems are named after members of the titled nobility of Europe.”
They’d probably got the cabling perfect just in time for everything to go wireless.
MonsterCon 3 was what everyone at the Forthrast Family Foundation called the event, because its official name was too unwieldy.
“I could not be more confused as to what we are looking at right now,” announced Gloria Waterhouse. She was a philanthropist, connected with her family’s foundation, nontechnical, and always the first to stand up and request commonsense explanations when the discourse became too academic. She’d assigned herself that role and she did it well.
Bitworld
“Fascinating,” El said. He was pretty clearly not fascinated.
Corvallis said, “So what is it you are asking us for, El?” “What I should have insisted on at the beginning,” El said, “which is full, coequal toho status. I want to be a token holder with unlimited administrative privileges on all aspects of these processes.”
His own professional journey, since then, could be seen as the single-minded pursuit of weird stuff, and the shedding, at every opportunity, of all responsibilities that didn’t qualify as such.
What’s the point of dying and being transmogrified into a digital entity if you’re going to use all of that computational power to re-create the analog world you just managed to escape from?
“Stable is good, right?” “Except when it’s bad. Totalitarian regimes, corrupt systems are stable.
he had printed these out on paper and handed them around, as if this were a business meeting in 1995 or something.
It was fascinating. Far outside the bounds of legit peer-reviewed research. More of a performance art project. But there were noble precedents for art leading the way and science following in its wake.
“The tales you tell are well-nigh incredible,” said the woman, “and yet they have the ring of truth about them.
The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you.
The dead’s lack of curiosity about the living had become a topic of study and of discussion
One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything. In retrospect, the Internet had been a revolution in human affairs, but one that had taken place just slowly enough that those who’d lived through it had had time to adjust in modest increments.
The logo was that of a Japanese company.
Robots did surgery on her knees through incisions so small that placing Band-Aids over them seemed like overkill.
The robot had its back to the door. Of course, robots did not actually need to sit down in chairs, but it was conventional for them to do so.
Anyone who has read David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality will notice that Fall owes an intellectual debt to it. Anyone who hasn’t, but who found Fall interesting, is urged to do so.
