Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)

by William Gibson

“Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”

“I’ve got something else, too.” “What’s that?” “Oil.” “Meaning?” “I’m not sure. But I ran this guy past my friend from Harvard, State Department. He says the outfit our boy is with has links to some of the players who’re looking central to Russian oil.” “Russian oil?” “Saudi oil has not been looking so good to the really big guys, globally, since nine-eleven. They’re tired of worrying about the region. They want a stable source. Russian Union’s got it. Means huge changes in the flow of global capital. Means we’re going to be running on Russian oil.”