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It is as though their inhabitants are rendered invisible in the transaction that allows such structures to exist in the context of the station. He is a student of existential sociology, and such transactions have been his particular concern.
He’s never learned much Japanese, not after eight months, and even if he could understand, he guesses, these people are all crazy, and they’d only talk about the things crazy people talk about.
The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
you couldn’t ride along the beach, not unless you wanted to climb over rusty razor wire and ignore the biohazard warnings every hundred feet.
They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.
she now knew a whole lot about nothing in particular, and nothing in particular about whatever it was she was actually supposed to know.
She straightened, turned, looked out at the lightening gray that was all she could see of the ocean now, past the black coils of razor wire, and felt a kind of vertigo, as though for just a second she stood at the very edge of the turning world.
There is nothing between the boy’s gaze and his being: no mask.
he, like everyone else, like the man himself, is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be.
He does this without thought. He does this with the same unthinking certainty with which, earlier, he killed. He does this because it fits, is fitting; because his life is in alignment with the Tao.
He leaves now. The moment in balance.
the frequency of razor wire suggested that this was not yet gentrified territory.
Fontaine has been trying all his life to cultivate dishonesty, what his father called “sharp practices,” and he invariably fails.
he’d left her alone, asking nothing, accepting her there the way you’d accept a bird on a windowsill,
eight hundred square feet of strata-title loft.
People don’t know what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a found object.
It looked like a piece of some different dream, fallen here.
benign procrastination.
This is a task (he thinks of it as a function) requiring emptiness.
less inclined now to move counter to the momentum of things.”
the death of history, but confronted with the literal shape of all human knowledge, all human memory, he begins to see the way in which there never really has been any such thing.
No history. Only the shape, and it comprised of lesser shapes, in squirming fractal descent, on down into the infinitely finest of resolutions.
they were writing multi-million-line software, the unspoken assumption was that in twenty years that software would have been completely replaced by some better, more evolved version.”
“But the manufacturers were surprised to discover that there was this perverse but powerful resistance to spending tens of millions of dollars to replace existing software, let alone hardware, plus retraining possibly thousands of employees.
when you need the stuff to do new things, or to do old things better, do you write new stuff, from the ground up, or do you patch the old stuff?”
Overlay new routines. As the machines got faster, it didn’t matter if a routine went through three hundred steps when it could actually be done in three steps. It all happens in a fraction of a second anyway, so who cares?”
all that really happens, these days, is that ancient software is continually encrusted with overlays, to the point where it’s literally impossible for any one programmer to fully understand how any given solution is arrived at.”
He was not inclined to charity, he didn’t think, but sometimes he found himself moving as if to right a particular wrong in the world.
The handles of a craftsman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand.
That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.
Flesh-ghost
It was a song about being sad and being tired of being sad.
absolutely authentic fake stuff,
he hadn’t known she was looking, so he hadn’t really been bothering to be the guy he had always pretended to be when he was with her, when he’d known she was looking. It was like seeing a different guy, a very scary, very cold, very angry guy,
whose premises consisted of three notebooks and an antique Chinese bicycle.
if you’re doing this yourself, or are knowingly party to it, you are in possession of or are party to possession of proscribed technology, which can earn you a stay in one of those extremely efficient prisons the private sector has done such a fine job of building and maintaining.”
that was just something her mind was doing while her body took her out of there the quickest way it saw.
what she’d been afraid of wasn’t that he’d hit her that time, or the possibility he’d do it again, but some instinctive, underlying recognition that there was something wrong, something way worse. That he was bad news and covered it up. Always, more carefully even than he chose his clothes.
“There are, literally, more humans alive at this moment who have measurably less than you do. You have this sleeping place, you have clothing, I see you have eaten.
when they turn to face the wall, that means it’s over soon.”
“Your knife. Made it for you. Wanted you to have it. Told me.” Looking up from beneath his sparse gray dreadlocks now. And gently says: “Asked us where you were, you know?” Her fit with history, and how that hurts.
very possibly the last of the pre-posthuman megastars,
the idoru, was an emergent system, a self continually being iterated from experiential input.
to the extent that her designers had done their jobs properly, she was a waking dream, a love object sprung from an approximation of the global mass unconscious.
It was that shape comprised of every narrative, every version;
his ability to apprehend the nodal points, those emergent systems of history,
Tara-May Allenby had told him that was called agoraphobia, and it meant “fear of the mall,”
an accumulation of architectural models and hillocks of documents suggest the courses of imaginary rivers: a topography in which might be read change in the world beyond the window, if meanings were known, and one were sufficiently concerned with outcomes.
A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general. Autonomous zones do offer a certain insulation from the monoculture, but they seem not to lend themselves to recommodification, not in the same way.
Somebody had everybody’s number, but it looked to Chevette like the game had all their numbers, every one, and nobody really was winning, but nobody wanted to hear that, or talk to you much if you didn’t buy into what they “really” did.
