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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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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
|
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 |
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40ee56a
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Better take her uniform -- all that gear," the second MetaCop suggests, not unlewdly. The manager looks at Y.T., trying not to let his gaze travel sinfully up and down her body. For thousands of years his people have survived on alertness: waiting for Mongols to come galloping over the horizon, waiting for repeat offenders to swing sawed-off shotguns across their check-out counters. His alertness right now is palpable and painful; he's like..
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Neal Stephenson |
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cfdda14
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Just like many Popish Plotters before them, these had promptly begun to "commit suicide" in the Tower. One had even managed the heroic feat of cutting his own throat all the way to the vertebrae!"
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Neal Stephenson |
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c550463
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For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. --HOBBES, Leviathan
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Neal Stephenson |
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8609195
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Saunt: (1) In New Orth, a term of veneration applied to great thinkers, almost always posthumously. Note: this word was accepted only in the Millennial Orth Convox of A.R. 3000. Prior to then it was considered a misspelling of Savant. In stone, where only upper-case letters are used, this is rendered SAVANT (or ST. if the stonecarver is running out of space). During the decline of standards in the decades that followed the Third Sack, a con..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9e12f10
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For three thousand years it had been the concent's policy to accept any and all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw one away. On one and only one occasion, this had turned out to be a wise policy: the millennial Apert of 3000, when 27,500 pilgrims had swarmed in through the gates to enjoy a square meal and see the End of the World. We had folding chairs made of bamboo, machined aluminum, aerospace com..
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Neal Stephenson |
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672949b
|
I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there." "There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators."
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Neal Stephenson |
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6fb7f1f
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in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.
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Neal Stephenson |
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78db914
|
Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers.
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Neal Stephenson |
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56a72a7
|
Say more about the Crips and the Bloods," Richard said, stalling for time while he tried to get his mental house in order. "To us they look the same. Urban black kids with similar demographics and tastes. Seems like they all ought to pull together. But that's not where they're at. They are shooting each other to death because they see the Other as less than human. And I'm saying it has been the case for a long time in T'Rain that those peop..
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Neal Stephenson |
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c71182d
|
Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a2dc2ee
|
So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes. The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9b64e90
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Maybe that's how great warriors do it. Carelessly, not wracking their minds with the consequences.
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Neal Stephenson |
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69a30c6
|
I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there." "There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators."
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Neal Stephenson |
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3be8334
|
Mammon led them on, Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heav'ns pavement, trod'n Gold, Then aught divine or holy else enjoy'd In vision beatific; by him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth For Treasures better hid. --MILTON, Paradise..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9b8777c
|
She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after.... She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.
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Neal Stephenson |