Gerhard’s Reviews > Firefall > Status Update

...oh, and have you heard about that new weaponized echopraxia that’s going around? Jitterbug, they call it. Used to be pure monkey-see-monkey-do, but they say it’s mutating. Now you get to die dancing, bring a friend along for the ride.

Plagues and firestorms in a single package. How very apocalyptic. Some splicer somewhere had a refreshingly biblical approach to weaponized biologicals.

“Echopraxia echofuckingpraxia,” Sengupta hissed at his shoulder.

“There’s no fucking justice anywhere, unless you make your own.”

Okay, that's Darwinian. Or Trumpian.

Brüks thought about it. “I don’t—think so. Not if she hacked us all the same way, anyway. Basic things, sure. Fear. Lust. Stuff that’s universal.” He smiled, a bit grimly, at the thought of the Crown’s surviving denizens sprouting preprogrammed hard-ons and spiked nipples. And that is really not a picture I need in my head right now.

The sexy bleeding edge, you know. First explorers on the post-Human frontier.

The thought of dying is just too damn scary. So we invent some Fairyland Heaven to take us in after we pass on, or we look to your friends and their friends to give us immortality on a chip or—if we’re hard-core realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

Was the universe a hologram or a simulation? Was its boundary a program or merely an interface—and if the latter, what sat on the other side, watching it run?

Matter took on strange forms inside that chamber. Atoms would lie down, forget about Brown and entropy, take a message from the second law of thermodynamics and promise to get back to it later.

Pre-Socratic Greeks intuited atomic theory in 200 BC. Buddhists were saying centuries ago that we can’t trust our senses, that sensation itself is an act of faith. Hinduism’s predicated on the Self as illusion...