Portals

by Douglas E. Richards

“Who watches the watchers?”

"Quis custodiet, ipsos custodes?"

taken the full brunt of the FOAB explosion and shockwave.

I wonder how the bomb was delivered? All the protection against satellite discovery that the conference attendees had actually left the castle does not explain why the plane dropping the FOAB wasn't traced after the obvious explosion.

“Which means he has tech that can block his image from registering on cameras.”

Or, he's not really the person in the photo, amd the hack was of the record, not the security camera or other systems.

to be outplayed.

Both of them should not have gone in together.

“Luck is the last refuge of the incompetent,”

A play on Isaac Asimov's aphorism, "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" from a character in Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy.

“We’ll wait until he crouches down to bind us,”

The bad guy shouldc have a tranq dart to shoot into each of them from a distance too. I wonder if the respirocytes coukd counter that?

Brilliant minds around the world are working to enhance the addictive properties of numerous products.

Apps and social media on little phones.

“Their efforts are insidious. Do you know why you aren’t charged to use social media platforms? Because you aren’t the customer. You’re the product.” “Meaning what?” said Ashley. “Meaning these companies are selling you. Data on every aspect of your lives. Your every purchase, every utterance, and so on. We’re now immersed in what’s being called The Attention Economy. Because the real end game of so many corporations and tech titans is to capture your attention. Addict you so you can be precisely targeted by advertisers, politicians, and others who want to influence or manipulate you.

Dreadful. Makes one consider becoming a Luddite.

a full-fledged addiction?” “When it becomes uncontrollable.

A good operational definition.

“So your drug could at least loosen the grip of a cult leader on his followers?”

Then it should be put into the drinking water of all red states.

Our adversaries had found a way to wipe the professor’s backups in the cloud, as well.

A disconnected backup, say on optical disc, flashdrive, or another medium never connected online would be wise; paper is best of all, though much more limited than digitally stored information.

yellow fever.

Is yellow fever endemic in Africa? Or only in South America?

“And as you’ve already seen,” added the AI, “I can’t even answer all of your questions about the how of it, as you put it.”

This is like the AI in the author's earlier book series, "The Enigma Cube".

including—most importantly—the progenitors of dogs and cats. Not surprisingly, dogs turned into man’s best friend on most human worlds.”

I knew there had to be a scientific reason we love dogs so much! ;-)

complete with carbon-14 signatures

Fossilized dinosaur bones long ago lost their organic carbon and cannot be carbon dated as the remnants of logs in a prehistoric fire coukd be.

unless you have the tech to recognize their quantum signatures—and

Just as in "The Enigma Cube" series.

at one point.

So wrong! It would touch the 2D world in anotger PLANE of 2D dimension!

translating if you will, so that you perceive this room in the usual three dimensions.”

So much easier to have another 3D space orthogonal to the space of our world!!

perfected mass-brainwashing techniques early on after extensive experimentation on their populations.

They began with the Corian equivalent of Fox News.

I had taken German in high school, and I was truly horrible at it.

«Das tut mir Leid.»

“It was invented in the nineteen thirties by an Italian named Caesar Cardini at his restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico.”

The Caesar Salad invented for a restaurant in Mexico.

Hankey was still trying to convince us this hadn’t been a bluff,

I don't think it was a bluff, and think Hankey believed he had destroyed the real base; but I think it was a ruse established by the enriched Corians as a decoy.

Chad could illicit the responses

Spellcheck failed because the wrong word is spelled correctly, but shouldn't an editor or proofreader have caught that "illicit" here should have been, "elicit"?

and ah . . . pop my cork, so to speak.”

Funny!

we’ll avoid your biggest mistake, by making sure smart phones and social media never comes into being.

Perfect! No "Meta", Facebook, Instagram, and God-awful Twitter!

If I could kill Kearn, it would be quite a setback to the empire. I’d be

Why would it be a setback? Kearn has 42 brothers and pribably children.

Burying the remote

The collar was buried, not the remote.

“the only people qualified to help govern are those who have no interest in doing so.

So true! I've often thought that government service should be like jury duty, and any desire to be in it is ipso facto disqualifying.

addict them mostly to him.

Trump & Twitter