False Value (Rivers of London #8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

I swear I felt a tingle of vestigium. Nothing professionally worrying, just a whiff of glitter and stardust.

personally, if I was managing a building full of poorly socialized technophiliacs I would have gone for personal lockers and mechanical locks.

I said this was great, because now I would always know where my towel was, but that got me yet another blank look.

that’s how they did it back in the days when computers filled rooms and the Lunar Lander touched down using hardware less powerful than my mum’s thermostat.

Libertarians and criminals complain about the surveillance state when they see a camera.

Once they’ve established that you’re not going to arrest them or their relatives, people like to help the police. Especially those doing dull, low-paid jobs in retail.

I believe in coincidence, coincidences happen all the time, but I don’t trust coincidences.

“So, who trained you?” I asked. “The Librarians,” he said.

There’s this power. We don’t know where it comes from or why it follows the rules it does, but it definitely exists and there are definite ways to manipulate it. Further advances in science have done little to help our understanding, except to add a growing temptation to attach the word “quantum” to everything.

the first rule of a good investigation is to check that somebody else hasn’t done the work for you,

I asked Reynolds if she could put the bodyguards on what we’d taken to calling the Unreality List of people that might be magical, members of the demi-monde or suspiciously weird. “It would save ever so much time,” Reynolds had said when we set it up, “if we just added the population of Florida right at the start.”

Florida Man is ON THE LIST

AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going “Daisy-Daisy” and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.

Apparently nobody ever expects the GRU,

Silver was confident because, in her experience, tech types were particularly attracted to conspiracy theories. “They all want to think they’re on a watch list,” she said. “It makes them feel important.”

“In three months,” I said. “I’m going on parental leave come hell or high water. And I literally mean high water.”

“Don’t get too involved with these people,” she said. “You might have to arrest some of them.”

Only people in the know gave Nightingale the definitive article, and I had to remember that I wasn’t supposed to be one of them.

Why Regent’s Canal had acquired a genius loci was a mystery, and why she was a female orangutan that escaped from London Zoo in the 1950s is doubly so.

Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it.

The media were continuing their comforting lack of interest in things that didn’t fit their various agendas.

everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

“You’re really pushing at the copyright there,”

my own actual thought about three chapters ago, actually.

It only became my problem if it was running off the Mary Engine and/or wasn’t an AGI at all, but something mystical and possibly malevolent.

I didn’t trust either of them not to get the reference. Especially Mrs. Chin—you’ve got to watch yourself around Librarians—they know stuff.

Stephen gave me a sideways glance and I realized that they planned to double-cross me. That was fine, since I was planning to double-cross them—it was just a question of who got their betrayal in first.

“You’re one of life’s honest coppers, Peter, and this kind of fucking fakery is not good for you.”

Looking back, maybe I should have been listening a bit more carefully.

“What have we got to lose?” I said. Nightingale looked up and gave me a strange, sad smile. “Oh, everything, Peter,” he said. “But then, such is life.”

“Do you mean Fae?” “I mean everything that’s not normal,” said Mrs. Chin. “Like New Jersey,” said Stephen.

add NJ to the list right after FL, eh?

Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion.

personally don’t so much believe in it as have to massage its feet when I go home at night.

I was done fucking about in the shadows—it was time to get legal.

“If needs must,” he said. “But I want you to be cautious.” “Hey,” I said. “Cautious is my middle name.” “But your first name is Never Knowingly,” said Stephanopoulos. Which got all the laughs it deserved.

“Glad to be of service,” said the door as it started closing behind me.

“Deep Thought,” said Skinner in his best talking-to-Siri voice, “deactivate the freight doors.” “It’s not me,” said Deep Thought.

Later I reckoned he’d worked it out too, but in that moment he didn’t want to admit it to himself.

A portal into darkness, the Rose of New Orleans had written, and I realized that this was an allokosmos, an alternative cosmos, pushing into mine.

And suddenly something was looking at me out of the darkness—huge and cool and unsympathetic.

“Perhaps it will be a suitable project for my retirement,” he said as we left.