|
d96d490
|
Just solving certain theorems makes waves in the Platonic over-space. Pump lots of power through a grid tuned carefully in accordance with the right parameters--which fall naturally out of the geometry curve I mentioned, which in turn falls easily out of the Turing theorem--and you can actually amplify these waves, until they rip honking great holes in spacetime and let congruent segments of otherwise-separate universes merge. You really do..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
921c0a6
|
A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it's parenthesized despair all the way down.)))
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
d0275d1
|
That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.)
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
fc0cd27
|
They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university? Evidently not
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
ff5e9a2
|
Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
e30b365
|
As far as my fellow students go, I'm one of the two dangerous rebels who turned up in office casual; the rest are so desperately sober that if you could bottle them you could put the Betty Ford Clinic out of business.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
6dde47c
|
Who knows? It's a long shot, but it just might work.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
0ab2920
|
one of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
96902fb
|
the stacks keeps you on your toes. Besides which, there are rumours of ape-men living down here; I don't know how the rumours got started, but this place is more than somewhat creepy when you're on your own late at night.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
93a6cd7
|
Yes, Bob, I rather thought entity-relationship diagrams were your sort of thing. You're the expert in Visio, aren't you? Drawing up UML diagrams of fictional vampire brood hierarchies should keep you out of trouble for a while.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
9529e42
|
Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
a0cd30a
|
before the hardcore idiots began cooking up bombs and declaring war on the System, a System that had ultimately gotten tired of their posturing and rolled over in its sleep, obliterating them.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
0aba104
|
This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
59e7454
|
We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms-- Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
e78790e
|
That looks nasty, I hope you've got a change of clothes back at the office. I guess now we know why real superheroes wear artificial fibers.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
7920f5d
|
The geas Billington's running. It's the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
c045571
|
wait--something's gumming up Bosch. (Computers aren't as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.)
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
57c22ca
|
It made economic sense, if you looked at it from the right angle; it was not in the Clan's interest for the price of the commodity they shifted to drop--and drop it surely would, if it was legalized or if the pressure to keep up the war on drugs ever slackened. But for Mike Fleming, who'd willingly given the best years of his life to the DEA, it was a deeply unsettling idea; nauseating, even. Bought and sold: We're doing the dealers' work f..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
cdeb275
|
The idiot child they've placed on the throne does not impress with his acumen.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
e4825f7
|
where it's not unusual for certain senior personnel to keep such a low profile that only the payroll computers in HR can remember their names.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
e941903
|
friend of mine who was turned down
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
4436348
|
I shake my head. The EQUESTRIAN
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
fb21fe0
|
the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
967b097
|
OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn't only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there'd be a queue outside every travel agent.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
a727957
|
IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one's own head--but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
18a9d27
|
LOOK, DO YOU really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats?
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
1d36c23
|
I'm a child of the wired generation, unlike some of the suits hereabouts who have their secretaries print everything out and dictate their replies for an audio-typist to send.)
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
8098837
|
They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
96a3142
|
Down in the park with a friend called Five.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
0f049e1
|
You want to know what it's like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
c0bcb5c
|
It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds, we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats. That's what Gianni pointed out to me . . .
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
534249a
|
When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere ..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
20b9929
|
fewer and fewer of our progenitors were replicating themselves via the weird, squishy process to which they devoted their organs of entertainment.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
6615ec4
|
crisis. Attempts were made to organize a captive breeding population, but the natural objections of the population in question to being so manipulated--combined with our own innate reflexive obedience-- foiled all such programs. We are conditioned to adore and obey our Creators on a personal basis, and while it is easy enough to understand the abstract need to preserve their kind as a whole, the conflict between their specific desires and t..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
523802d
|
How boring, just another billionaire necromancer cruising the Caribbean in his thinly disguised guided missile destroyer, plotting total world domination.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
af30383
|
We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
cfb42b9
|
the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
ece3460
|
I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my need for intimacy.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
66366a4
|
Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. I'm not dead, he reasons; therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which case, this can't be Pa..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
8dba6b5
|
Fifteen minutes later I'm hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you'd find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town; but I'm not nipping about town. I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a canno..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
229d73a
|
Alas, yes. Unfortunately our little canary has gone Section 2 on us. He's absolutely Upney;* halfway to Dagenham, in fact. We're keeping him here because he's not deemed a hazard to himself, but so far he's confessed to assassinating Margaret Thatcher--
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
cfb34ac
|
There is good management and bad management: good management is like air--you don't know it's there until it's gone away.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
41a442f
|
loose lips don't merely sink ships, they summon krakens with too many tentacles.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
30d3234
|
It has so much character that it's probably being hunted by a posse of typographers.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |