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Dimples. Granddaughters with dimples. That’s what you need to be careful of in this life.
mean, that’s protecting society, right? It’s never just that, of course, and sooner or later you’ve got a chipped human population which is an appreciable fraction of the whole. So very, very not cool. Except that it’s so much better than just locking them up to make ashtrays. Except that it’s worse. Or is it?”
In the midst of a perfect world, where power is in a way truly held by the people and government has almost entirely gone away, there’s a thin strand of horror, of interrogation machines mandated by the majority and algorithms that see everything you do and want to know why you did it,
There was a building I knew in the centre of town that had a little of what I wanted, a white concrete thing all shelves and angles that, in the right combination of rain and wind, gouted sudden torrents of water on to people below.
picking off strangers and old flames, old enemies and finally one’s family, until what you might call without irony a skeleton crew remains, each of us fighting to be the last—or perhaps the second to last, to leave some poor sod the one who truly dies alone.
Why, after all, should there be seven colours? The answer is that there are not, as my parents could have told me. The rainbow is a continuum of infinitely many colours. Seven is no more a real count than Father Christmas was always red and white.
The old northern Europeans had swart and blaek: the wicked and elf-filled matte black, and the fertile luminosity of a darkness that filled the night with shapes and benign magic.
White—wite and blank or albus and candidus—could be just as dangerous as black, or just as godly, in the ancient world: a leprous sickness or a guide in the storm.
I was exploring Twitter and finding it by turns enlightening and infuriating: a close encounter with wit and scholarship and the joy of living that could drop away beneath one’s feet into a sea of sheer pointless nastiness—though
If digital devices were going to change the way we thought, that was fine, so long as they made us less monstrous rather than more.
“Free” came to mean not “unchained” but “unpaid”—a conflation that no doubt delighted authoritarians across the globe.
If the interrogation killed her because she would not reveal her mind, and it cannot be proven that what was in that mind was genuinely of importance to the security of the nation, then what does that mean?
It means what State power always means — move on to the next abuse, the next victim.
Living in an environment of almost total surveillance, Keene nonetheless contrives to be opaque.
The transition is immediate and somehow inverted, as if she has jumped into a cold swimming pool to cool off and landed with a jolt on the diving board, hot and dry and marooned.
It would be nice if they’d felt as strongly about my mind as they do about my body. But apparently they don’t. I’ve spent a certain amount of time thinking about this recently, and I have concluded that a doctor who attends the victim of a torture chamber and does not object to the torture is a wanker.
The right to avoid self-incrimination, the right to die, the right to live, the right to freedom from slavery, freedom of conscience and religion, of opinion, and the right not to be tortured—all these exist as subheadings of that one, simple statement: I am me and I am not yours.
We learned that to lie to a machine, you don’t need to be a perfect liar: rather, you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses.
The most alarming notion is that someone—or everyone—you know might be an avatar of someone a level up: they might know that you’re a game piece, that you’re invented and they are real.
Information so densely specific that it becomes poetic and allusory.
What you puzzle out for yourself you must by definition incorporate into who you are even if you reject it. She’s forcing us to see the world through her eyes in order to understand what she says.
The Alkahest is the solution to everything, the Holy Grail: a Universal Solvent that will heal all wrongs and empower the merest mortal to judge gods and bind monsters to her will.
You live in the foundation stones of a city of boundless spires, but you turn your face to the dust.
I hear your objection, drab and small, that the aspiring serial murderer of cosmoses is not well-placed to judge humanity. Tell me again about your time, so full of compassion and fellow feeling. No?
And finally there went also the outcasts and the drifters, by dint of that strange human gravity which at certain times appoints one place the locus of all that is odd and ill-suited, and from a bubbling pool of psychological toxins periodically ejects genius.
So: two beekeepers walk into a pub. It’s a nice pub in the country somewhere, with really good beer. It’s been a longish time since they’ve seen one another, so they order a couple of pints and set to talking, and when they’ve talked about families and the papers and the church roof, they come—inevitably—to bees. “My bees didn’t do so well over the winter,” the first guy says. “How so?” asks the second. “Well,” the first guy says, “I lost a couple of hives. The queens died. So that was a shame. But on the upside there’s some really great new meadowland growing up around where I live, so the
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They lied to you when you were a child: the grub does not become the angel. It melts and dies and from the foetid stew emerges a new animal. Metamorphosis is not transmigration. It is the retooling of meat.
There was a school of thought about twenty years back that instruction manuals should be hard to read so that users were forced to learn the instruction set rather than refer to the readme.
In the Wire Mother test, mice were conditioned to consider a razor-edged structure as a parent—which they did, taking food and rewards for proximity and becoming accustomed to the inevitable injuries. Analysis revealed that, after a while, their brains came to consider the abuse as something like love.
It is something she could have lived her whole life without ever doing, staring down into the tubular ruin of a chest cavity.
Does it make any sense to call them wounds when there is in any individual sample more wound than corpse? Smith is not wounded: his wounds are lightly touched with the remnant of Smith.
She had assumed there might be a threat to her, personally, but not to information. You can always get information out these days—except if you can’t.
The Witness is compromised to a significant degree, and therefore by definition also the System as a whole, the two being inseparable. If the machine is not an honest broker then the System is—for the time being and to a greater or lesser extent—not a perfect state at all, but a perfect prison: a Panopticon in which the condemned must assume they are watched at all times and in all places, and act in line with the will of an arbitrary power.
justice incomplete is not justice, it is the anticipation of wrong.
when Catherine the Great told her chancellor that she wanted to ride out in the great Empire of Russia and meet the happy peasants everyone kept telling her lived there, the chancellor—his name was Potemkin—understood immediately that shit-caked, disease-ridden serfs begging from frostbitten lips and extending three-fingered hands to their absolute monarch would not entirely fill her with joy.
I was a half-mad prisoner in a hot, square box, listening to the screams of the Sixty and wondering how I of all people could possibly be the sixty-first.
She took the passenger seat and stared straight ahead, as if she was fixing her eyes on a future that did not offend her, and nothing on this side of the road existed at all.
We called campaign groups and newspapers and we let our defiance be known. Everyone was angry for us. Everyone said they would help. The next night, someone threw a bomb against my armoured window.
“You possess unlimited power, but finite knowledge.
If faith is salvation, should we just pick a lie and love it unto death? Does that mean that a circle of hell, truly embraced, is heaven?
I should be sitting in a bulletproof car right now, the kind that can squash a Hummer like a soft-boiled egg. I should have two guys in the front seats called Steve and Warislaw, both with those mid-Atlantic accents that tell you they learned English in Slovakia, the hard skin on their hands that tells you the other stuff they know.
She kisses me on the mouth. She tastes of menthol cigarettes and Coke. I belong to her for ever, and she to me.
Perhaps it’s just the kidnapping context, but I find him a great deal less amusing than I did.
Well, no matter. Here we all are. I spent quite some time imagining that I would have you pressed like a sack of olives between two stones. There is a press here that would do very well. But…but. I think I will make you an offer instead. You are a man of commerce, after all.
So now our modern friend has a choice: civilisation has abandoned him. Will he, then, cling to it? Or will he pick up a club, or a hammer, and go next door to do what must be done for his survival? Or will they both, like brothers, march upon the keep of the invader? The frame by which he understands the world is broken. He needs something new to judge his actions, to know what is right. Something new, or something old.
Stockholm syndrome. Well, fuck Stockholm. I’ve been there. Expensive food, really pretty people who get depressed and talk about Third World debt when they should be screwing.
Cocaine is an unpredictable drug. Some people like to have a paramedic team on standby when they party, and I know a major corporation that keeps a pair of helicopters flight-ready during the Ibiza season so they don’t lose any key personnel to poorly applied recreational pharmacology.
Her fingers graze the blade of my hand. It is our first contact, skin on skin. Not really first contact, I suppose, because she put a bag over my head, so technically we have touched before.
We see as shadows all that is real, and as gold all that is dross. We must work to change what we understand.
She hesitates, then grins. “I don’t know, Constantine. Isn’t that marvellous?”
He is either right, or mad. Although I’m not sure what madness looks like on someone who has a complete and coherent variant understanding of the world.
