Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

No one now shall live in fear of those they also love.

locatively discursive spimes.

maintenance is one of the ten commandments of good engineering.

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.

they are boxes for the storage of surplus persons. The message of uselessness in the stones is not hard to unpack, and the inhabitants read it as soon as they saw where they were put.

‘The problem, Eminence, is that there aren’t enough high-quality poor people.’

There’s a kind of penumbra of rich people – another few hundred thousand – and a twilight zone of merely affluent people whose standard of living and location is basically the extent of their wealth, a kind of geopolitical fortune rather than a bankable one, and then basically everyone else is poor as hell.

I make a note: coder women are my people and they are crazy hot.

There must be a door between the real world and the godly one, and if there is it must be found in desperation and love. It is known to all of us, that feeling of immanence: the certainty that there is a missing limb, invisible and ineluctable, that answers the need of the soul.

The Inspector contemplates an outcome of her investigation in which she is compelled to place under arrest for sedition a pile of limited edition magical realist novels allegedly containing a human mind, and devoutly hopes Mr Shand’s construction of the situation is not the right one.

‘We have to think about this stuff now, before we build it, otherwise we’ll just find it happening around us.

I imagined that we might lose the vote, despite the obvious absurdity of that outcome, and from there I conjured a Europe made weak by division in the face of predatory Russia, and limping along just offshore, a Great Britain buckling under rising debt and the asinine policies of a Conservative administration hostage to its more ridiculous fantasists.

And there couldn’t be any abuse of the system, because the system would be built not to allow it.

Hahahahaha

Good grief but Facebook riled me, laid out like the want ads of a local paper and glaringly white, the algorithm stifling news from outside one’s bubble and pressing inappropriate sponsored content like a man on a street corner with a collection of flyers for his new-minted religion.

The woman who wakes tomorrow is not the woman who woke yesterday, for all that there is a line of consequence between them. They are separated from one another by event.

I always used to get furious with the nuns at school when they said that modern theology understood the Creation took more than seven days, that it was all symbolic. Why? Why should it? Perhaps billions of years of astrophysical and biochemical evolution is what seven days of God’s work looks like from inside.

So often in life it is that which we do all the time that simply slips away from us between instants.

You sit reading news that has nothing new in it, telling yourself that because you hold in your hand some glossy skeuomorphic lozenge you are technologically au fait, and that because you know where in the endless repetition of tribal politics and fairydust economics your world is, or have consumed many of those books published in pale cream jackets by university presses, you are somehow informed about what is important.

I am not many. I am one. But I am in many places at once, and those places are very far apart.

Perhaps the false memory only extends in the direction you look, a paper-thin reality creating itself at the limit of your borrowed senses. She makes a note to ask – firmly discarding, at the same time, a vertiginous query that occurs to her a moment later: how do we know that the real universe does not also work that way?

Apparently I really, really don’t like hierarchies of power.

there was more to the mind than a robot and a poet fighting for control of a beast.

I am Gnomon. From this moment, so are you.