Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

Statistical analysis and even soft logic can take machine learning only so far into the quirked and sideways landscape of human irrationality.

What a given thing means may vary not only between two individuals but from moment to moment.

The first is a government of the people, by the people, without intervention or representation beyond what is absolutely necessary: a democracy in the most literal sense, an ongoing plebiscite-society.

The Witness is not prurient. The machine cannot be bribed to hand over images of actresses in their baths to tabloid journalists. It cannot be hacked, cracked, disabled or distorted. It sees, it understands, and very occasionally it acts, but otherwise it is resolutely invisible.

In the gaps where the cameras cannot scan or where the human animal is yet too wild and strange, there are the Inspectors,

unlike an actual brother, the Witness does not intrude. It is just always there.

I feel instantly embarrassed but I also think: Fuck you. It’s weird having your surface thoughts broadcast like this. Weird and horrible, but also a little bit liberating. If someone is rude enough to intrude on the ticking of your brain, to peel back your polite silences and your social graces and poke the fleshy grey stuff in search of secrets, they can just deal with what they find there.

Just because something is done according to the law does not mean that it is lawful.

They’ll go home and tell their friends they did a good job. They’ll greet their partners, their spouses, their kids, and if they let on in the small hours of the dark that they’re not without qualms, they’ll say in the same breath that they know it’s necessary. 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.

The Witness is the sun, and my home is made of shadows—or perhaps of shade.

How remarkable, that people will behave so well without being indexed. It’s not scalable, apparently; not realistic in the wider world. 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.

we need a better sort of human being, not a more just law. We need to change the way people think.

They rustle and hide and derive great pleasure from flouting my law. I teach them reading and disrespect for authority, and I consider my work well done.

I am said to possess a list of reactionaries and bad elements, and I suppose in a way I do, I just don’t think of it as a list. I call it my life.

Someone who talks like that, according to the System, may represent a potential security risk to the wider nation, a refusenik culture which, if significant numbers were to follow its lead, would imply the end of the Witness and the System, the end of the benign, stable, all-seeing state we all inhabit.

While the stuff brews, she makes toast and honey, as always bewildered and a little creeped out by the origin of the sweet comb. On the other hand, once you start down that road you won’t be drinking milk, either, and then you might wonder about cheese, or wine, and if you’re in that headspace then to be honest all food—meat or vegetable—takes on the alien tinge of life ingested,

No one is a single thing; everyone is a network, or a mosaic.

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

the idea of sexual contact with Lönnrot feels transgressive, not grotesque or unpleasant but utterly foreign, like making love to a bookcase.

Uncanny valley: the place where simulation is too close to reality to be comfortable, but too far away to be mistakable.

Perhaps the assassin is sacred and the detective is profane.” Another censorious glower. “So much depends on your angle of view.”

An instant later she is flying at a wall. She recognises a print from the Dogs Playing Poker series by Coolidge, supposedly ubiquitous, but she realises this is the first time she has actually ever seen one, and then she hits.

I chose to be unhappy and rich, rather than unhappy and poor.

It does not occur to them to admire serendipity, or to court it.

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.

I mean, they were by definition always junk, but you were sort of okay if you went with the good junk rather than the ones they made later when the demand was so high they thought it would be clever to create junk-junk and label it triple-A, and when everyone and his aunt decided to borrow ten million dollars against a fucking shack in the Everglades.

Use your head: no idea that proposes free money is ever a good idea, because money is mathematics and mathematics does not allow you to add something to one side of the equation without balancing it on the other—but

In other words — TANSTAAFL

Finance by itself is ruthless, and that ruthlessness is its salvation. The real disasters are only possible when you bring politics into it, because politics is about pretending to care.

You want to borrow half a million dollars against your shitty backlot and build a house you can’t afford, and you want to never make any payments and just owe the full amount plus interest—a sum total which is more than your ugly mosquito-infested pit will ever be worth—in forty years, by which time you will almost certainly be dead? We can accommodate that.

It wasn’t important, in the first instance, whether the loan was good. It was only important that someone wanted to buy it, and they did.

Ours were sins of laxity, as you might say, and those of America and the rest were sins of enthusiasm. They were seized with the joy of an impossible equation, a getting of something for nothing, and the result was that our sleepy little country was brought to a dark place.

He smiles, and I wonder if my mouth is noticeably open or if I look as fucked in the earholes as I presently feel.

Dogs are not cosy. Dogs are dogs. They are animals. They need clear hierarchies or they get confused and when they’re confused they piss on things, bite things, and mate with things until they get less confused. That’s all.

and then like an earthquake the moment ends quite simply, and we are just two fellows who have never seen eye to eye in a hug we’ll never acknowledge again. A heartbeat later, even the embrace is gone.

He just sits there, and every so often I catch the scent of his exhalate and know that I am tasting tiny parts of the skin of his mouth.

The streets are full of spongers and the halls of power are full of cheats.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s simply such a concentration of access and resource that it cannot help but carry weight.

There are things that should be immune, and the people who don’t understand that distinction, the distinction between what is fair game and what is not: those are the people who should go to jail.

That night, I buy drinks for an entire strip club. An Israeli dancer, the only one I’ve ever met and a former tank commander, sits naked on my lap and whispers in my ear. She’s rather charming. I have never been so lonely in my life.

Would I care to come to [insert broken country here] and institute a new economic plan? Perhaps an island off the coast for my personal paradise would help me to decide?

If you believe in that sort of thing, which I try not to. It’s not good for an alchemist to believe in things. You perform what works and speak the words, and leave the pretension of knowledge to priests.

Air returns, shockingly cold. I can still hear, at the edge of perception, the whisper of chitin.

What function does it serve to cut a man in five pieces? None. Save that it is the difference between banality and bewilderment.

It seems I am a woman in a world of stone and clay, who has the gift of making metal swords.

Christ, at least, had the good manners to multiply loaves and fishes, rather than conjure them from air.

Quite absurdly, the crucible fills with light.

Once, in Addis Ababa long ago, I walked through the walls of my prison and escaped. I wish I could remember how.

I do try, but somewhere in me is the shape of him, standing naked astride a pile of Lego bricks with his face covered in baked beans, declaiming, “Frain frain frain!”—his childhood word for “train.”

It is our pattern to grumble and itch at one another, and then to make amends in openly devious ways.

My Ethiopia is not accessible, anyway: washed away in the river of time, and the new one just another hot country run by angry men.