Gridlinked Quotes

“Cormac was completely aware that he was being manipulated, but how he could not see. He reckoned that when he did find out, the surprise would be a nasty one. That was how it usually went.”
― Neal Asher, Gridlinked

“prodestinationactinicablecomlivesurvin—”
― Neal Asher, Gridlinked

“Humans: fast machines that serve the purpose of slow genes.’ Most right-thinking people would agree that we are not to be trusted with our own destiny and are glad things are the way they are. Our history should be a salutary lesson held at the forefronts of our minds when we consider these matters. Nowadays you do not see such bloody resolution to events as was seen in the past. I mean, you don’t see the machines killing each other, do you?”
― Neal Asher, Gridlinked

“Skaidon was a genius. At age six he took one of the old-style IQ tests and was rated at 180. After he was congratulated, it is reported that he said, ‘If you like I’ll do a test to 190, now I know how they work.’ Throughout his life Skaidon mocked those he called, ‘Hard-wired lead-asses.’ Should you wish to know more about this, I direct you to one of his numerous biographies. This book is about runcibles. Today we are aware of the dangers of directly interfacing a human mind with a computer (not to be confused with the less direct methods of auging or gridlinking). Skaidon was the first to do this and he died of it, leaving a legacy to humanity that is awesome. It took him twenty-three minutes. In those minutes, he and the Craystein computer became the most brilliant mind humankind has ever known. He gave us Skaidon technology, from which has come instantaneous travel, antigravity and much of our field technology. The Craystein computer, in its super-cooled vault under the city of London on Earth, contains the math and blueprints for the runcible (for reasons not adequately explained, Skaidon loved the nonsense poem by Edward Lear and used its wording in his formulae to stand for those particles and states of existence we until then had no words for, hence: runcible – the device; spoon – the five-dimensional field that breaks into nil-space; pea-green is a particle now tentatively identified as the tachyon) and to begin to understand some of this math let us first deal with that nil-space shibboleth wrongly described as quantum planing . . . An Introduction to Skaidon Formulae by Ashanta Gorian”
― Neal Asher, Gridlinked