Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

If she believes she’s the reincarnation of my dead girlfriend and I say she is, then that is what her passport will say.

I don’t know what to do. The etiquette of propositioning a woman not quite my dead girlfriend—and not quite a sympathetic kidnapper part of a vile organisation—is unclear.

If it is possible to have an orgasm from a combination of gasping, desperate gratification and sheer horror, that is what happens.

Finding yourself in black water means you’re sinking fast. It had not occurred to me until now that all these colours belong to the day. In the nighttime, it’s all black water.

Like that, but with teeth.

We need a way to make sure people make the right choices with their freedom.

What do I know? I know that human beings and fundamental particles share one absolute commonality: they exist in their interactions.

I know that Albert Einstein proposed two persons hanging in space alone in a universe that contained nothing else, and observed that if one of them is spinning, there is no way to determine which. Everything depends upon its relationship to everything else for its meaning.

I fall. I get up, and try again. Repeat and repeat. Falling hurts, but it feels like winning. Small pain, local pain, and results.

Once again, the populace votes for lies and tinsel on a Christmas tree of ordure while on the world’s other face death is more common than shoelaces.

The System is good only if it is inviolate and impartial. If not, it is a monster.

she didn’t die, and it was better than the other thing. End of story, good night. That’s how you survive being a doctor. You don’t keep score against God because he cheats.”

She is a loyal servant. Only now it transpires that her master is disloyal and she has nowhere to go but home.

An optimist, is Jonathan Jones—as every dog-owner must be, who lives in a white-walled house with beautiful things.

“A bug, then.” “No. In the words of the old saw, it’s not a bug; it’s a feature. The bug is people. People are messy and inconsistent. They are irrational. When our modern democracies were first put together, their makers assumed that people were ultimately rational. By the time the System was created, its architects knew that this was untrue.

“The devil in the detail is that Smart Crowds are fragile. With a very little adulteration, they cease to be smart at all, and become remarkably stupid, or indeed self-harming.

“It makes us better. Not different. Not less free. Just better.”

You were able to get away with all that because whoever built Firespine gave it emergency prerogatives that allow it to override just about every aspect of the System in order to conceal itself. Because if it falls down suddenly, so does the System.

She feels a lurch of horror: to come this far into the maze and find not a Minotaur but a collection of cattle mooing and dismayed.

This whole setup isn’t just open to abuse, it requires it.”

We don’t want you to follow our orders, Inspector.” She points to the head of the table. “We’re asking if we can follow yours.”

Truth be told, our priests rarely look the way we feel they should, and the ones that do are the ones you really have to watch.

Life is not guaranteed to be comprehensible, only comprehensive.