Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

Their partners and their spouses will tell them they are brave, because they accept the sleepless nights of troubled conscience so that everyone else can be safe. No doubt that’s how it always goes with torturers.

Above a certain threshold, it’s no longer a personal trust governed by the rules of friendship, but a tragedy of the commons, and people just steal.

This business of billions—what the fuck can you buy with a billion that will fill the hole? Nothing. I know. I’ve seen it. There’s nothing. Not all the Edvard Munch paintings and white truffles and Bentleys will do the job. A year later you just need another one. Honestly, it’s worse than iPhones.

It’s not always easy, being Greek. Even the mud has gods in it.

the Franciscans, who can lay claim to one of the real zingers, a guy who talked to birds and healed practically everyone in Tuscany at one time or another.)

When they cashed out I have no idea, but they are now a smallish subset of the Orthodox religion with the kind of money more usually held by people who create search engines or new ways to smuggle heroin.

real disasters are only possible when you bring politics into it, because politics is about pretending to care.

the lending banks are neither idle nor stupid at the pointy end unless you specifically instruct them to be, which is where politics comes into it.

topologist is a person who cannot tell the difference between a teacup and a donut.

Dreaming, I gave myself to the solution of puzzles, and thereby held back tears.

this syncretic empire of Rome in Africa,

Jupiter Ahura Mazda

Is that what free will is: the right to be flogged to moral action by a deity who could make the world a paradise merely by speaking His desire? They say that God is merciful, and His mercy is like agony because we are inverted by sin. I know all the arguments, and each more empty than the last. The world is what we make.

Seven is no more a real count than Father Christmas was always red and white. (He was green and silver until the Coca-Cola Company made him their messenger, in case you didn’t know.)

I was once more the relapsing madman of my first career, the world around me transformed by my strange eyes into a strange place. I had come home.

My talent was a sudden thing, queer and perpendicular to all I knew.

the extranoematic masque of the great Anaximander of Miletos, now part of a galactic consciousness and here imparting to me the knowledge that the true reality is a series of five concentric branes or skeins,

There was a subclass of gamers, Annie said, who existed as ludic spelunkers, interested only in going where no digital foot had gone before,

White people looked subtly wrong in the game, sickly and slick. It was an elegant political prank, especially in a medium not widely known for progressive nuance,

Astronauts are persons who contain multitudes.

with a slantendicular glance to catch her response.

It requires painstaking research, endless attention to detail, a lot of careful reading of subtext and dominant social flow, and a keen awareness of generational and demographic differences in semiotic uptake. Far more valuable than essay writing. It’s coursework, set by themselves, meaning I get more time to relax while still tutoring students to the highest grades in their final competitive examinations.”

Metamorphosis is not transmigration. It is the retooling of meat.

Baba Yaga was Russian, and so were Rasputin and Kalugina, and the East had always understood, wrapped in the icy wind of the Steppes, that there was more to the mind than a robot and a poet fighting for control of a beast.

Since the World Trade Center fell, these same vices have come to the so-very-modern worlds of London and Washington. How many harmless young black men have been injured or killed in modern cities in white countries this year, for the crime of exciting someone else’s racism?

is what these people do. They leave spaces in the truth for you to fall into, or they take advantage.

Fall in to the gap

the System is premised on the idea of a Smart Crowd—the