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Homicide. Rare in Thousand Oaks. The only killings down here were made in real estate.
Authorities have surrounded a walled estate owned by the late Matthew Sobol, a leading computer game designer who died earlier this week of brain cancer. Six law officers were killed and nineteen others injured serving a search warrant at the property. They were reportedly attacked by a computer-controlled SUV that still roams the grounds.
It had the brutal cleanliness of a military barracks, and by revealing nothing about Sebeck it revealed a lot.
The phrase excruciating death kept running through his mind. This was not an idiot he was dealing with here—he was the idiot. And he was truly afraid.
"We polygraphed them all. None knew anything about Sobol’s plan—although plenty of them wrote code for purposes they didn’t understand." "That’s no surprise. It’s project management."
Still, he hadn’t been stopped on the way in. Must’ve been the suit and the white-guy car. For the first time he considered that classism might trump racism.
Neurons work like logic gates on a computer chip, firing electrical signals in specific sequences to accomplish certain tasks or to conceive certain generalized concepts."
Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too—but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees.
Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.
In essence, computer systems needed to do only one of two things: make money or save money. Everything else was just details. Scut work. These tasks Lindhurst delegated to the executive senior veeps, who, in turn, delegated them to someone else . . .and so on. It was only during times of complete disaster that Lindhurst involved himself with the actual computer systems themselves.
"Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female—making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system.
"Technology. It is the physical manifestation of the human will. It began with simple tools. Then came the wheel, and on it goes to this very day. Civilizations rise and fall based on technological innovation. Bronze falls to iron. Iron falls to steel. Steel falls to gunpowder. Gunpowder falls to circuitry."
When you stopped changing, you started dying.
Spammers Massacred, Thousands Dead—A daring and well-coordinated attack launched Monday morning may have claimed the lives of as many as 6,000 prolific spammers in 83 countries. Over two hundred died in Boca Raton, Florida, alone. Authorities are still reeling from the magnitude and sophistication of the strikes. The assailants left behind the same message: "All spammers will die."
"So who’s starting all these Factions?" "The disaffected, the dispossessed, the displaced, the disgruntled. Worldwide." "That’s a few people."
"You’re not thinking in enough dimensions, Doctor. Only part of me is in this building."
Gragg couldn’t deny some level of admiration. Merritt had probed Gragg’s defenses, found a hole—one that would be filled in the future—and improvised an exploit. What hacker couldn’t admire the man’s cojones? His instincts?
I’ll tell you what the Daemon is: the Daemon is a remorseless system for building a distributed civilization. A civilization that perpetually regenerates. One with no central authority. Your only option is what form that civilization takes. And that depends on the actions of people like you."
"I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.
