All Tomorrow's Parties (Bridge, #3)

by William Gibson

The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely.

“Son of a bitch,” Creedmore said, though Rydell took it to be more a reference to the universe that had created Rydell than to Rydell himself.

Fontaine has been trying all his life to cultivate dishonesty, what his father called “sharp practices,” and he invariably fails.

“Nobody,” Tessa said. “Nothing. She’s the real deal. Hundred-percent unreal.”

“No,” Tessa said, “you’ve got it exactly backwards. People don’t know what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a found object. Traditionally, anyway.”

We were all volunteers, he thinks, as he clutches the eyephones and follows his point of view over the edge of a cliff of data, plunging down the wall of this code mesa, its face compounded of fractally differentiated fields of information he has come to suspect of hiding some power or intelligence beyond his comprehension.

RYDELL HAD A theory about virtual real estate. The smaller and cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and cheesier the website. According to this theory, Selwyn F.X. Tong, notary public, of Kowloon, was probably operating out of a rolled-up newspaper.

Where, it comes to her, she was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring. And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was, she scarcely knew it.

A lost child himself, he has every intention of staying that way.

Shoats had pushed his chair back from the table to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge and his belly, and was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars.

All his life Laney has heard talk of 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. But there is will. “Future” is inherently plural.

“The infinite plasticity of the digital.”

History was plastic, was a matter of interpretation.

But the main thing about knives, even ones that cut steel-belt radials like ripe banana, was that they weren’t much good in a gunfight.

And this is the way it always is, for Fontaine, when he knows that things are bad, very bad indeed, and very likely over. He likes to keep busy.