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1fd6749
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Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture?" Hiro asks. "They were emblems of royal power," the Librarian says. "Their origin is obscure." "Enki must have been responsible for that one," Hiro says. "Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me and the gis-hur, the 'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe." "Tell me more about the me." "To quote Kramer and Maier again, '[They be..
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Neal Stephenson |
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64548f1
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The lieutenant looks somewhat taken aback that Uncle Enzo is concerning himself with such a tiny detail It is as if the don were going up and down highways picking up litter or something. But he nods respectfully, having just learned something: details matter.
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Neal Stephenson |
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054f834
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Did you hook up with your girlfriend yet?" "No. But I have high hopes for that. Assuming I can stay alive." "High hopes for what?" "Our relationship." "Why?" she asks. "What's changed between then and now?" This is one of these utterly simple and obvious questions that is irritating because Hiro's not sure of the answer. "Well, I think I figured out what she was doing -- why she came here." Another simple and obvious question. "So, I feel l..
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Neal Stephenson |
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3d8b118
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But for the moment it was just a pattern of sensory impressions painted on the screen of her memory, not soaked in yet, not understood, not even granted the dignity of having really happened.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7819898
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In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your home-own. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jer..
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Neal Stephenson |
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17bcd7d
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He pokes his katana through the side of the cube and follows it through the wall and out the other side. This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall -- this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building -- but it does have th..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e6155fd
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It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.
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Neal Stephenson |
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22536c7
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The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code--but their children believe it for entirely different reasons." "They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it." "Yes. Some of them never challenge it--they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillu..
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Neal Stephenson |
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8388289
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He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice.
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humor
humorous
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Neal Stephenson |
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5b20399
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Dinah could spend the rest of her life living by her word, giving everyone a fair shake, and all of that. Rufus would no doubt approve of all those things. But it was not the charge he had given her. He had told her, though not in so many words, to get busy building a future.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0d2578a
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Yo, Y.T.," Roadkill says, " 'sup?" "'Sup with you?" "Surfing the Tura. 'Sup with you?" "Maxing The Clink." "Whoa! Who popped you?" "MetaCops. Affixed me to the gate of White Columns with a loogie gun." "Whoa, how very! When you leaving?" "Soon. Can you swing by and give me a hand?" "What do you mean?" Men. "You know, give me a hand. You're my boyfriend," she says, speaking very simply and plainly. "If I get popped, you're supposed to come a..
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Neal Stephenson |
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d4d7da9
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We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a tongue that's based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages." "Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says. "Yeah. I guess 'deep structure' and 'infras..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9feb765
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THE MONASTERY GATE was as weak as Finn surmised, the timbers splintering after three strong kicks from Finn's boot. Using his spear as a wedge, he ripped and tore the rotted wood away until there was a large enough hole to pass through. After ducking and looking, he went first, leaping nimbly through the gap. Cnan followed, more readily and eagerly than she had anticipated, and Yasper came close on her heels.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ef60695
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Why would that cause him to pack up his bolt, chord, and sphere, and hurry to Ecba, of all places?
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Neal Stephenson |
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75dbd02
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In the parking lot of a Safeway on Oahu," he says. And he's telling the truth; in the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations. "I'm kind of busy now, Whitey -- but what can I do for you?" "It's Y.T., " she says, "and you can help bust me out of The Clink." She gives him the details. "How long ago did he put you there?" "Ten minutes." "Okay, the three-ring binder for Clink franchises states that t..
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Neal Stephenson |
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147363a
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it might be true in the future." "But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now."
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Neal Stephenson |
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634535c
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We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes you..
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Neal Stephenson |
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3bf4a6b
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Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the firs..
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Neal Stephenson |
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3351be1
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There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machi..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e098ed7
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To put it mildly, the International Space Station, until now, had never been the kind of place for surprise visits.
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Neal Stephenson |
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89fe415
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All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral -- a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliv..
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Neal Stephenson |
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be6a2ea
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What makes one Sumerian city better than another one? A bigger ziggurat? A better football team?" "Better me." "What are me?" "Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws, but on a more fundamental level." "I don't get it." "That is the point. Sumerian myths are not 'readable' or 'enjoyable' in the same sense that Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally different consciousness from ours."
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Neal Stephenson |
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a3e392f
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Aister interprets the myth as 'an exposition of a logical problem: Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?'" "Ah, there's that word 'binary' again." "You may remember an unexplored fork earlier in our conversation that would have brought us to this same place by another route. This myth can be compared to the Sumerian creation myth, in which heaven and earth ar..
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Neal Stephenson |
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1537683
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Pronounces the name of everything created?'" "In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it. He is referred to, in various myths, as 'expert who instituted incantations,' 'word-rich,' 'Enki, master of all the right commands,' as Kramer and Maier have it, 'His word can bring order where there had been only chaos and introduce disorder where there had been harmony."
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Neal Stephenson |
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45b9433
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Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to..
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Neal Stephenson |
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4eb41be
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We're like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b95c34d
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The roads shed lanes, then insensibly narrowed, grew rougher and more tortuous, until without having noticed any sudden transitions we found ourselves driving on endless one-lane tracks and stopping to avoid flocks of livestock so tough and emaciated they looked like jerky on the hoof.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e569141
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Just because the Panjandrums know how to run cheeseburg stands, they think they know how to run a Convox.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2ddd880
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Richard was, at bottom, a guy who did stuff. A farmer. A plumber. A Barney. What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in the belief t..
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Neal Stephenson |
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6e3881f
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I feared he might be trying to grow a beard again.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d006ada
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But when I tried to meet her eye now, she pointedly looked away, and fixed her red and swollen eyes on the big stained-glass window above the slate. Since (a) it was dark outside and (b) the window depicted Saunt Grod and his research assistants being beaten with rubber hoses in the dungeons of some Praxic Age spy bureau and (c) Tulia had already spent something like a quarter of her life in this room, I reckoned that inspecting the window ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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0187233
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It's time for him to get over into the right lanes where the retards and the bimbo boxes poke along, random, indecisive, looking at each passing franchise's driveway like they don't know if it's a promise or a threat.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c2c4880
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My son, in the eyes of Heaven, we are all as little children. No one of us is more important than another. In fact, the more important we think we are, the less we stand out in the eyes of the Lord.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0f485ae
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Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you.
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harsh
observant
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Neal Stephenson |
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3dc025d
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Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other. The only difference ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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a1e5818
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And she went on in this vein for a minute or two; she could talk about alloys the way some girls talked about shoes.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f038304
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Y.T. is bored. She gets on her plank. The wheels blossom and become circular. She guides a tight wobbly course around the cars, coasts down into the street. The spotlight follows her for a moment, maybe picking up some stock footage. Videotape is cheap. You never know when something will be useful, so you might as well videotape it. People make their living that way -- people in the intel business. People like Hiro Protagonist. They just kn..
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Neal Stephenson |
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213dcea
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Mathic architects were helpless when it came to walls. Pillars they could do. Arches they were fine with. Vaults, which were just three-dimensional arches, they knew everything about. But ask them to construct a simple wall and they would go to pieces. Where anyone else in the world would construct a wall, they'd fill in the space with a system of arches and tracery. When people complained about wind, vermin, and other things that would be ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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6f2e9c0
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Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega-jackpot. It's got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler.
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Neal Stephenson |
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fbb1f4a
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but the great thing about traveling with Pluto was that he only cared about you to the extent that you were interesting to him now. In that way he kept you on your toes. No aspect of the relationship could be counterfeited when it was being minted anew from moment to moment.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a955c4b
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they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies--yes, the entire medium of cinema--to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T'Rain and see what they were missing.
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Neal Stephenson |
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cb6b1b8
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If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be able to reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other. So wh..
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Neal Stephenson |
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382d97c
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There's one black-and-white who stands out because he's taller than the rest. The Street protocol states that your avatar can't be any taller than you are. This is to prevent people from walking around a mile high. Besides, if this guy's using a pay terminal -- which he must be, to judge from the image quality -- it can't jazz up his avatar. It just shows him the way he is, except not as well. Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is l..
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Neal Stephenson |
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67f8e8e
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These Burbclaves! These citystates! So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue.
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Neal Stephenson |