More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“You don’t have to remind me,” Enoch said, greatly amused.
“That’s the cream of the crop who are doing that,” Enoch said. “The one percent. That’s Joseph and a few dozen of his handpicked elite. People you could actually have a conversation with. The other ninety-nine percent don’t know anything about Leviticus and they don’t understand or care about the theology—the repudiation of the doctrine of the New Covenant and the idea of Tactical Jesus. They just know that you had better do what Joseph says, or else. And Joseph for his part gets to claim with a straight face, to anyone who cares, that his approach to law and order has a kind of divine
...more
“Yes, there is an old family connection to that place.”
“Was a mathematician. Yes,” Enoch said, getting clipped and impatient as Julian continued sifting through old dead Enoch Root hits.
have had some dealings, back in the day, with the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes, and more recently with Elmo Shepherd,” Enoch explained, “and through Elmo I met Jake Forthrast, who imagined that I might be of use, or at least of interest, to his spiritual research. So I am an adviser to ONE and I interpret my responsibilities broadly and some would say creatively.”
“But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don’t have to consult an online source.”
Zelrijk-Aalberg straddles the border of Belgium and the Netherlands but has never quite belonged to either of them,” Enoch reported. “It makes Andorra look like Siberia.
It encompasses eleven separate enclaves that are not part of Zelrijk-Aalberg.
Four of those are Belgian and seven Dutch.
One of the Belgian enclaves contains a Dutch subenclave, and one of the Dutch enclaves contains no fewer than four subenclaves, of which one is Belgian and the remaining three are all parts of Zelrijk-Aalberg proper. The largest of those contains a Belgian sub-sube...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Most of its revenue, until recently, came from selling fireworks that were illegal in the neighboring countries,” Enoch agreed. “What Julian here is referring to, with the fractals, is a thing that happened when a former count of Zelrijk-Aalberg paid a visit to the property to engage in the ancient custom of beating the bounds.”
Once a year, an entourage of bigwigs walks the circuit of the property line and beats it with sticks.”
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.”
“This particular ancestor of mine didn’t actually live in Z-A, or visit it that often. He had an estate in Germany that was a thousand times as large. After all of this happened he went back there and wrote a paper about it, which was forgotten until the 1960s, when it came to light in the course of ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
the four Princetonians had arrived at the collective determination...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Enoch’s answers tended to be vague, brief, and self-deprecating. He had a knack for segueing into some other topic that was invariably more interesting than whatever had just been asked of him.
Enoch Root was there; he had already availed himself of a hot dog and a Heineken. “I had my eyes on the Szechuan noodle bowl,” he remarked, “but couldn’t work out how to manage the chopsticks.”
“Enough about me,” Enoch said, though they hadn’t talked about him at all. “What is your plan? I get that most of you have internships lined up on the West Coast?”
“How remarkable,” Enoch said, “that of all the interests a brilliant young lady such as you might pursue, you landed on one that is best pursued at the Forthrast Family Foundation.”
“How much do you remember, Enoch, from when you were four years old?” He smiled. “That was a long time ago.”
Enoch seemed to take it as a cue to shift gears. “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?”
Enoch assured her after her silence had grown awkward. “Few people actually make decisions on that basis. I was curious in a more general way about the big questions. Where it’s all going.”
Tom Willis.
am referring to the branch of it that seems to aspire to becoming a consumer product.”
Enoch nodded and turned his head to gaze out the window into the storm. “I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes fully that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll reboot in exactly the same state as when you last lost consciousness. Like waking up from a nap. On the other side is Jake, who believes in the existence of an ineffable spirit that cannot be re-created in computer code.”
“Jake’s opinion is based on a theology I do not agree with.
like a lot of theologies it can do duty as a cracked mirror or a smudged lens through which we might be able to glimpse things that are informative.
I do have a suspicion that there are aspects of who we are that will not come back when our brains are scanned and simulated by the likes of Elmo. It’s not clear to me that memory will work...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
not clear that the brain will know what to do with itself in the absence of a body. Particularly, a body with sensory organs feeding...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Of a world, at any rate,” Enoch said.
The western plains had been tough to live on even in the cooler, rainier heyday of white settlement and were now well on their way to becoming a desert.
“Case in point,” Enoch said to Sophia, apparently picking up last night’s conversation where it had left off. “You and I are sitting, what, about a meter apart, looking at this.” And he did not have to explain that this was the extraordinary scenic panorama of Glenwood Canyon. A human driver would have slowed down to enjoy it, but the car’s algorithms seemed to take it as a challenge and treated it as a slalom course. “We’re not just seeing it, we’re feeling it!” he half-joked as everyone was slammed leftward by an abrupt right curve. “Literally feeling it in our bones. The geometry of it, and
...more
The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk. In recognition of, and indignation over, which they had passed a law ordering the state licensing bureau to stop accepting motor vehicle paperwork from Moab. Unable to register vehicles in Utah, the people of Moab had begun
...more
“Depends on how far back you want to go,” Enoch pointed out.
we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.” “But in order for the rich to get what they want, they also have to have a functioning tech economy, right? Because their wealth isn’t based on controlling land, like in the old days. It’s based on stock.”
“that a brain, or a digital simulation of one, needs to be embedded in a world that agrees with itself as to what is what.”
And it has to agree with any other brains that happen to be hanging around in the same world.”
Organization for New Eschatology.
“Here is where I leave you,” said Enoch. “Thank you for helping take me down from that cross and for bringing me this far.”
eyeball farm.
“Epiphany” was a deep, crazy, metaphysical/religious term.
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.
One of them, a grizzled, red-bearded guy with a somewhat shaggy academic vibe,
that this must be the guy, Enoch what’s-his-name, who had recently been crucified in Nebraska
Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation
saltation: suddenly leaping forward.
the other side of that bourne from which no traveler returns,
“IsasdftFffiI13da!,” for “I stole a shower daisy from the Forthrast family farmhouse in Iowa 13 days ago!”
migrate over to a DID protocol.” Sophia knew what it meant: Defense in Depth. Instead of all-or-nothing access to a whole system, you sort of had to work your way in, proving and reproving who you were using various factors.
