Hardwired Quotes

“Computer cores made of liquid crystal that can re-form itself into any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and the altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis. Hearts that can make minds, from little bits if brightness in Cowboy's skull that let him move his panzer, to large models that create working analogs of the human brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet.

All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Computer cores made if liquid crystal that can re-form itself into any configuration, creating the ultimate efficiency for any particular piece of cybernetic business that needs doing, shifting from storage of data to moving it to analyzing it and the altering to a form most efficient for acting on the analysis.Hearts that can make minds, from little bits if brightness in Cowboy's skull that let him move his panzer, to large models that create working analogs of the human brain, the vast artificial intelligences that keep things moving smoothly for the Orbitals and the governments of the planet.

All in miniature potential, here in the cardboard box.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“It is late afternoon. The world has paused to catch its breath, and the ice-cream streets melt slowly in the sun. The people of Pennsylvania wait in the hush for the twilight that will soften the tempered Gerber edges of their world.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Using a cellular telephone is like standing naked in an open field with a megaphone, screaming Please kill me and take all my stuff.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“We want to move a thousand of these,” Cowboy says. “All perfect, all Orbital quality, made for Yoyodyne by their Olivetti subsidiary. OCM Twenty-two Eighty-ones, to be precise.” There are matrices times fifteen K in the panzer, but he doesn’t want to take more of the Hetman’s property than necessary. He hasn’t forgotten whom Sarah is really working for.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“They said to hide,” Sarah says. “They’ll pick up the computer hearts when things cool down in this part of the world.” “No way for us to get home?” “None where we won’t get assassinated the second we show up in the Free Zone. No one knows who to trust.” “Whom,” says Cowboy.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“There is only the single imperative, Survive this Moment. The past scarcely matters; the future will be dealt with, instant by instant, as it arrives. Each tick of the clock, a new burden, a new application of the imperative.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Where does the shaped charge go when it has done its task? It flies apart, needles of steel each pursuing its own end. Scrap, seeking oblivion.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“It is no longer enough to be the best. Somehow, as well, it matters to be wise. To know on whose behalf he wields the sword.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Sarah's lips curl..."That's not my kind of action." Still, there is a trace of hesitation in her voice, as if she's bidding farewell to a cherished dream, having found its price.”
― walter jon williams, Hardwired

“Lucky Cowboy and his clean hands. By chance you had a talent somebody wanted, and now you're able to afford principles. Good for you.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Thunder explodes over their heads and Sarah sees the silver sheet of water pouring down outside the broken barn door, Cowboy slumped against the wall with a rueful smile, the buttons in his head reflecting the lightning in blue-white pattern, silver and turquoise, like eyes gazing inward, into his head. Sarah feels a sweep of sadness for Cowboy, the dispossessed panzerboy, his boots leaving tracks in the dust above which he once flew with his mind flicking at the speed of light.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Sarah knows she's walking behind a man who's about to lose his first, his biggest war. She feels the dry, cool fingers of sadness touching her. No way to win without becoming one of them.

Sarah wonders if he knows it, if he's just playing on because it's all he knows how to do, or if he really thinks he has a hope. In a strange way she wants him not to know, to keep believing in his own star for a while longer, so as not to lose it all at once, all he ever worked for or dreamed....She knows too well how that feels.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Ivan's going to die...that's why we follow him...We always follow the doomed ones. The ones who show us the way.

The world will follow, no matter what. We just want them to accept that. Go with a little dignity, a little forethought.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Sarah, her mind strobing colors, reaches blindly into her pocket, finds her inhaler, triggers it once up each nostril. Her nerves burn with electric light.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“It's the same as the city, Sarah knows, the same hierarchy of power, beginning with the blocs in the orbits and ending with people who might as well be the fieldmice in front of the blades of the harvester, pointless, countless lives in the path of a structure that can't be stopped. She feels the anger coiling around her like armor. The chance to rest, she thinks, was nice enough while it lasted. But right now another fragment of time must be survived.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Porn mainlined to the forebrain, electric orgasms courtesy of induction, screaming synthetic highs circuited to the mind, technicolor power fantasies jabbed right into one's primal need.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“The panzer, she decides, is a place only a junkie could love. A cozy cybernetic womb of masculine scent, soft blinking lights, the studs that feed one's addiction. Whatever Cowboy's is, she doesn't want to know.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“It's for us, Daud. To get us out, into the Orbitals...Where it's clean, Daud...Where we're not in the street, because there isn't a street...It'll be different. Something we haven't known. Something finer.

You should see your eyes when you say that...Like you've just put a needle in your veins. Like that hope is your drug, and you're hooked on it.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“...the technology of personality transfer is imperfect--sometimes bits get left behind: memories, abilities, traits, that might be useful. A full succession of bodies can mean successive senility.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“We weren’t running the Line, Cowboy thinks, for the Northeast. Or for the money. That was what Arkady and the thirdmen never understood, always thinking we could be bought, that we would respond to economic pressure. And that’s what the Orbitals don’t understand, what their crystal world models can’t figure. That we’d have run the Alley for nothing. Because it was a way to be free.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“They’re up here, and they’re lost. Once their obedience to Earth gave them meaning, and then their struggle against it, but now they don’t know what to do. They’re too distracted by their structures. They got their independence, but they don’t know what it means, and they’re looking for the things that will give it meaning.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“her mouth was a cruel flower. “Hair”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“I’ll figure a way out,” he promises, and in some part of his own mind sees a monochrome image, himself and Reno, Raul and Lupe, Sarah looking as if she’s been lit by von Sternberg and bearing a resemblance to Louise Brooks, all in some improbably large delta cabin, sailing against a background of gray watercolor-wash clouds pierced by the bright swords of sunbeams, a happy silver nitrate ending glowing on the screen of Cowboy’s closed lids, and he has a feeling he can work it somehow, flick a switch and things will turn out that way, if he just knows what switch and when.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“Yoyodyne”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

“-Pointsman”
― Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired