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Plurals
anthracene and pyrene.
James' topology shifted and shuffled in the silence; when she opened her mouth again, someone indefinably younger was on top. "Their habitat isn't anything like ours, if they're building a home way out here. That's hopeful."
Plurals
She'd had less than three minutes. Or rather, they'd had less than three minutes: four fully-conscious hub personalities and a few dozen unconscious semiotic modules, all working in parallel, all exquisitely carved from the same lump of gray matter. I could almost see why someone would do such deliberate violence to their own minds, if it resulted in this kind of performance.
Plurals
Plurals
Plurals
"Our integration may have actually occurred quite recently. Some experts think we can still revert to multiples under the right circumstances."
Plurals, the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind
Simple stress could do something like it, if it was strong enough. If it happened early in childhood." "No kidding." "Well, in theory," James admitted, and changed into Sascha who said, "Bullshit in theory. There's documented cases as recently as fifty years ago." "Really." I resisted the temptation to look it up on my inlays; the unfocused eyes can be a giveaway. "I didn't know." "Well it's not like anyone talks about it now. People were fucking barbarians about multicores back then—called it a disorder, treated it like some kind of disease. And their idea of a cure was to keep one of the
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DID, plurals, stress
Imagining the topology of the Gang's coexisting souls, I could see why Sascha embraced the mythology. I could see why Susan let her. After all, there was nothing implausible about the concept; the Gang's very existence proved that much. And when you've been peeled off from a pre-existing entity, sculpted from nonexistence straight into adulthood—a mere fragment of personhood, without even a full-time body to call your own—you can be forgiven a certain amount of anger. Sure you're all equal, all in it together. Sure, no persona is better than any other. Susan's still the only one with a
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I could not only see why Sascha had objected to the word; I could also see why Isaac Szpindel, no doubt unconsciously, had spoken it in the first place. As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.
"I've been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I might turn into someone else." "That's ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person." I thought about that. "Maybe it does."
Plurals
Szpindel had rattled off dementias like raindrops. I went to ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried below the limbic system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw and felt, independent of all those other parts layered overtop like evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared effort for only the most rudimentary sensory processing. But it was fast, and it was
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Plurals
my eyes just slid off
The City and the City
her makes me shudder?" The system called Robert Paglino sat quietly, and sipped his drugs, and set the things he was about to say in order. He took a breath.
Protein synthesis is almost prionic—reconformation instead of the usual transcription pathways—but I can't figure out how those bricks get slotted into the wall once they're made."
if you can't feel, you can't really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world's upper echelons, hmm? How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded up in the stratosphere, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted off into detention with the Realists.
