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When a professional shark wrestler gets bitten in half by a Great White, that’s not irony, that’s somebody getting precisely what they signed up for.
Arthur had learned early in life that reality only existed as the collective perceptions of the beings living in it, so if one could manipulate those perceptions, they could effectively control reality.
“If you want new world-saving tech to be cost-competitive enough for adoption, this is how it happens. Labor is expensive, if you’re rooting for tech to get cheaper, you’re rooting for people to lose their jobs.
“And you think they’re all being abducted by these religious types? And what? Killed? Held prisoner somewhere? That doesn’t sound like the Christian thing to do.” Axol stared at Zoey. “Bitch, have you ever opened a history book?”
“And the law-and-order candidate is a Nazi,”
There’s nothing in Damon’s platform that involves preventing crime from happening. His promise is that he will inflict harm on the bad guys. Big difference.”
“The point,” said Will, “is that if all crime disappeared from the city tomorrow, people like Damon would have to find a way to bring it back. The harsh measures are the ends, not the means. But right now, it means you just need to stay cool.” He nodded toward a golf cart that was rolling up to the gates from the other side. “Looks like they’re here.”
“Again, it’s only terrible because people like you make it so. It’s the same as how you just made fun of me for working in a coffee shop. You want coffee, you want coffee shops to exist, you want people to work there, but then you have open disdain for the very workers you just admitted you need. What is that? This requirement that people—especially women—have to do their jobs and then, on top of that, have to be a receptacle for your rage?”
“What we disagree on depends entirely on whether or not our conversation is conducted on-camera. And the only reason you or anyone else think crime is rampant in this city is because the worst of it gets splashed across everyone’s feeds in real time. The media pours snuff films into every eyeball until the citizens grovel at authoritarians’ feet and say, ‘Please, please take away my freedom.’”
That’s the problem with our whole system, our whole society: power goes to the ones who want it most and the ones who want it most tend to be more conniving and diabolical than any of the supposed street thugs they’re trying to scare you about.
Pun-loving local headline writers spent their days praying Rex Wrexx got into a car accident, so maybe it was for the best that he lived in a moving vehicle.
“And this has been today’s edition of ‘Will Blackwater Tries to Make Someone in Distress Feel Better by Triggering an Existential Crisis.’ You always know just what to say, Will.”
“You create a viral scandal that propels a psychopath to power, he slowly takes over the world, and humanity descends into a thousand years of darkness?”
To get a population that can sit in cubicles and resolve conflict with words instead of clubs, we had to be domesticated. That occurred via selective breeding, that’s why everything in Biblical times came with the death penalty, they had to filter the savages out of the gene pool.”
“And controlling which babies get born means controlling who has sex with who. So it’s not just the sex workers you want to ban, it’s all sex outside of the purpose of producing a superior race.”
“Snowcloak is bringing him onstage on the West side, just after they do their opening prayer. Just as a side note, I’ve gotta say that’s the perfect name for what has to be the whitest band that has ever existed.”
“Look,” said Alonzo, “what the citizens want couldn’t be simpler: They want all evildoers to be instantly apprehended and punished, with perfect accuracy and no inconvenience to the innocent. They want jobs with good pay, flexibility, and low stress but also want all products and services to be available instantly, at all hours, and dirt cheap. They want generous government infrastructure and benefits, but without paying taxes. In other words, they want the impossible. So what they get instead is a show.”
If reputation is the only thing keeping a man in line, well, then all he has to do is build himself up a following that’ll turn a blind eye to anything but an atrocity committed live in front of their eyes, and maybe even that.
His connection to them was, by design, nebulous and unspoken, an association that existed in the minds of the voters but on no documentation or payrolls. If they stop a crime, he takes credit. If they screw up, they take the hit. It would be a shame, Zoey had said, if someone were to exploit that ambiguity somehow.
Well, guess what, there’s more collective wants than there is collective stuff, so now what? You don’t know, because criticizing the system without taking the risk of offering alternatives is nothing. It’s a dog barking at thunder.”
“And what nobody had to tell me, because I figured it out myself, is that people are just people but celebrities are an idea. If you want to stop one, you can’t just kill the person, you have to kill the idea.”
