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83b91bf
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Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.
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fate
living
life
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Charles Stross |
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0c39a2b
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She extends a fingertip. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred's breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a..
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Charles Stross |
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aedb560
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There will be plenty of backup and support, but she's still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don't understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dripping from her fingertips is coming for them.
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Charles Stross |
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b649b3f
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Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I'll be waiting with a shotgun.
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Charles Stross |
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4b6e7b9
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After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs)
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Charles Stross |
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66a70c4
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I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago--your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.
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Charles Stross |
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1b5e0e3
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Someday I'll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let's just say this example is screaming "megalomaniac!" at me."
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Charles Stross |
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400d789
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Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
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Charles Stross |
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2f11cbf
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Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like "memory leak" and "debugger."
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Charles Stross |
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8931a31
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Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder. "You can't be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories - he worked for her, didn't he?" Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!" screeches the harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!" It lurches sideways, t..
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zero-sum-game
economy
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Charles Stross |
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ab238fb
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I don't mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It's like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies.
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Charles Stross |
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e6666a2
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This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms--translation: all your bank account are belong to us--
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science-fiction
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Charles Stross |
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8e1d0a0
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Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint.
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Charles Stross |
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e74d0f7
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the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.
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Charles Stross |
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f5c4e74
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There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger.
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delivery
getting-attention
messenger
ego
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Charles Stross |
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464805e
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He monologued at me. With PowerPoint. He what? And you're still sane? Obviously I underestimated you.
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Charles Stross |
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916b09e
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the ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant.
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Charles Stross |
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aa357dd
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Jest upalny letni wtorek. Stoi na placu przed dworcem Centraal, ma wlaczone galki oczne. Kanal skrzy sie sloncem, wokol smigaja skutery i rowerzysci-kamikadze, ze wszystkich stron trajkoca turysci. Plac pachnie woda, ziemia, rozgrzanym metalem i spalinami z zimnych katalizatorow, jak pierdnieciem; w tle podzwaniaja tramwaje, nad glowa fruwaja ptaki.
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Charles Stross |
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8a774b1
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corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a PS20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There's nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives i..
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Charles Stross |
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19cda66
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The glass isn't half-empty or half-full. What you're looking at is half a pint of depreciable assets sitting in a pint of capital infrastructure that can be amortized over two accounting periods." ... "Is there an engineering one?" ... "Yes! It's quite simple: That's half a pint, all that's wrong is the glass is twice as big as it needs to be."
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Charles Stross |
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f372451
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I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs: I can even take your thighs as a deposit," said the travel agent. He was clearly trying hard to be helpful: "It's not as if you'll need them where you're going, is it?" "Is it possible to find a better price by booking me on a different routing?" I asked. "I'm very attached to my limbs." (Quaint and old-fashioned, that's me.)"
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Charles Stross |
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237bb65
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There's a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city.
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Charles Stross |
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84d9db9
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money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
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Charles Stross |
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25e4a19
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You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default.
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Charles Stross |
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e2b251e
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Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky--it
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Charles Stross |
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4182b9a
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if you want to work on data covering more than about one month you're supposed to phone Mr. Jobsworth at BT and whine for help.
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Charles Stross |
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fa256d0
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There's no briefing sheet on what to do when a supernatural soul-sucking horror disguised as a beautiful woman starts crying on your shoulder.
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Charles Stross |
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ace5608
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The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and walked around on their own legs. I have heard of some bizarre vocations in my life, but seldom anything quite so disgusting.
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Charles Stross |
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8dde98d
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Cocktail hour at the embassy consisted of lots of charming men and women in suits and LBDs drinking Buck's Fizz and being friendly to one another, and so what if half of them had gill slits and dorsal fins under the tailoring, and the embassy smelled of seaweed because it was on an officially derelict oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, and the Other Side has the technical capability to exterminate every human being within two hundred k..
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Charles Stross |
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ceae2b6
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Sociopath" was one of the most useful concepts that Miriam's Memetic Engineering Task Force had imported from the United States: Erasmus's Propaganda Ministry had been working overtime to raise awareness of it as an Anti-Democratic Problem: "People who think People are Things."
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Charles Stross |
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b9eb25b
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There's always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they'll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made of a chromed baby's skull.
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Charles Stross |
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1542f0b
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I feel ill with emotional indigestion: I don't think I've ever felt for Mo the kind of raw, priapic lust I feel for Ramona, but Ramona is a poisonous bloom--off-limits if I value my life.
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Charles Stross |
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f82a482
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To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.
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Charles Stross |
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f8d57b0
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Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.
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Charles Stross |
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2ddc28e
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America is the place where you cannot kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern. --Woodrow Wilson, 1919
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Charles Stross |
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8332d95
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scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.
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Charles Stross |
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52d8f7f
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There isn't very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn't get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control.
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Charles Stross |
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0dc43e8
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For instance, I never wrote to my MP to express my displeasure at the widespread deployment of sleeping policemen around the capital. It never occurred to me to do so: Mo and I don't own a car, and speed bumps
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Charles Stross |
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3c4eace
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The bastard knows I need to know what he knows and he knows I can't say no.
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Charles Stross |
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60447e4
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It popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus... I've been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, it is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.
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humor
microsoft
vulgar
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Charles Stross |
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98ceadc
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Everything - the entire 400-megabuck investment, ten years of Company black operations - depends on what happens in the next few hours.
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Charles Stross |
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a3a21c5
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Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions.
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Charles Stross |
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eb6a578
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Revolutions (she'd long since learned) ran on committees just like any other government, once you got past the screaming-and-shooting stage.
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Charles Stross |
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da30f19
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Being management means having to hold your hands behind your back while your inexperienced junior staff crap all over a job you could have done in five seconds--and then taking their mess right on the chin.
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Charles Stross |