Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

The System is the will of the plebiscite, and the plebiscite genuinely reflects the people.

in the end the general will is that artists and makers should be able to function profitably within what remains a largely capitalist economic apparatus, which entails some form of ownership of their work.

once deployed in this way the technology will inevitably spread to other uses, and the consequences of those should also be considered;

There are many advantages to the end of privacy, and one of them is the obsolescence of social awkwardness.

No frame. And no data connection, because the house is a Faraday cage. For the first time in her adult life, the Inspector has no idea who she’s talking to.

“It’s traditional to beat down the shamus in the first chapter,”

Deliberately casual to the point of crass, because this affords my new client the opportunity to rise above me on a moral level. It’s important that Nikolaos Megalos should feel morally superior, because he’s basically at school here and no one who wears a hat like that has been the junior partner in a master–student relationship for quite some time.

“The problem, Eminence, is that there aren’t enough high-quality poor people.” The Patriarch’s eyebrows very nearly reach the brim of his hat.

This morning I was a very good banker. Now I am touching the edges of financial godhead.

They use all the same dog whistles, the same humblebrags, the same pleas for tolerance that somehow make intolerance seem quite reasonable.

International finance is not done in boardrooms, it’s done here, in these liminal spaces that are made out of money. Governance is in the private terminals at global aviation hubs, in occasional palaces and ubiquity, in sharing a limo because you have nothing to prove. The merely rich talk about their other homes, their other houses. The gods do not. If they need somewhere, they acquire it, or someone else provides it. They do not keep track of nations or properties, because they are at home everywhere.

They bickered happily. I was pleased by them: Annie’s energetic creation paired with Colson’s blend of making and paranoia. It made for an excellent team.

Thus encouraged, I threw in more mystical shapes as they came to me: a fish-white assassin in a Warhol suit; a banker in the robes of an ancient priest; Annie herself, much older, captured and interrogated in the ugly society she had imagined for us; and her grandmother, slim and beautiful and ailing, cast as a Roman scholar and made just different enough that I did not think Michael would see it.

There was a subclass of gamers, Annie said, who existed as ludic spelunkers, interested only in going where no digital foot had gone before, and they would abandon the main history and work their way through every subsidiary tunnel and hidden door and find whatever we left. Let two disparate characters be reading the same book, she said, or let their homes have the same plan, and no sooner was the game released than there would sprout a jungle of secondary interpretations to make villains of heroes and saints of monsters. Woven about the spine of events, there must be truths and implications, revealed in asides and recurrent symbols. They would make meaning out of everything.

—I can see you, the Witness replies on the general channel. Neith tuts and shakes her head: that should be a given.

Are these Hunter’s memories, then, through a distorting lens? Athenais the librarian, the free thinker, could certainly be a mask for her; Bekele, an old man looking back on an eventful life and now in crisis one more time; Kyriakos…something else. Singled out by a god. A vehicle for destruction. Are these clues? Or a false trail to send her into the maze?

ejecta

The alarm bell that rings in her head twenty minutes later is surely nothing more than an echo of Diana Hunter’s paranoia. All the same, she cannot quite let go of the idea, as unsettling as it is absurd, that the visit of Pippa Keene creates a paper trail of official concern that might, down the line, be used to displace or discredit her.

Of the various ways to operate your biology according to your conscious desires she has learned here and there, one of the most useful is the knowledge that it is physiologically difficult if not impossible to vomit while humming.

Somehow or other he is the only one here: a caprice of traffic flow.

The Squid is liminally legal: where on the margin it falls depends on how it is deployed. Its ostensible use is to shield citizens from the unwanted attentions of unrestrained American and Asian robot advertisers, which would otherwise harvest data from their personal lives through every available aperture and then deluge them with information about alternative products every time they view or purchase anything on the international network. For this reason, most people now use a System filter portal to access the rest of the world, but a robust minority like their access to reflect the external experience, the better to understand the people of foreign lands—hence the Squid.

VPN

ushers her into a chamber that is, she realises, a species of interior barbican, bulletproof in all directions and probably airtight as well.

“Five locks, Inspector. Five gates through which the pilgrim must pass to enter the Holy Land. But the last of them is truth, which by definition cannot be counterfeited.”

London’s Daily Mail called it fallacious and bombastic, which meant that the Guardian asserted it was the product of genius.

Chum is not bait but mood music, an invitation to sharks.

There have been no names for villains in any of this, she realises: Smith is commonplace. Megalos merely means “great.” No names, just the things themselves.

People will be very alarmed, and in his experience they always feel better knowing there’s a bookshop open.