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564d470
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Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he says. "What's wrong, Sarge?" "I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says."
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Neal Stephenson |
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ecfc6df
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The Japanese Mafia. Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our thing as 'The Sicilian Yakuza'? Huh?
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Neal Stephenson |
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40ee56a
|
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
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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
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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
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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
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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 |
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3b69635
|
Birth and death," Chet said. "The poles of human existence. 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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45cc136
|
They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7c45c62
|
Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c4d2035
|
Fearless for oneself, fear for others--that must be what it means to be a hero.
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Neal Stephenson |
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75638c3
|
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not..
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Neal Stephenson |
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37f0074
|
Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he's ready, the answer is always the same, sir!
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Neal Stephenson |
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3941a87
|
Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they're still nothing more than video games. Hiro's not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It's owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deal. But it's also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programme..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9ed6f3d
|
The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual, face-shredding, eyeball-poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime, inhabited by vast platinum-blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low winter sun. Crystalline
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Neal Stephenson |
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727716f
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His baseline attitude toward 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 that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and there was no point in arguing about anything that would be so ob..
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sales
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Neal Stephenson |
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c6da01b
|
The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they're constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don't even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they'd printed up signed ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ccbd17c
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Daniel was slow to take up the cheer. But when he did, he meant it. This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war. Roger was being cheered because he had won. What did it mean to win? It meant being cheered. So Daniel huzzahed, as lustily as his dry pipes and creaky ribs would permit, and was astounded to see the way people came a-running: not only the Quality from their town-houses, but hooligans and Vagab..
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Neal Stephenson |
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98397c1
|
Or a Moonie festival or something.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d4c40f2
|
The last year had been an education in how little having money really mattered. A rich Vagabond was a Vagabond still, and 'twas common knowledge that King Charles, during the Interregnum, had lived without money in Holland.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c25e829
|
I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?" "It's a drug, asshole," the guy says. "What do you think?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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da1c7df
|
Well, I am not fully convinced that I really need this," Randy says. "We all need to decide that question for ourselves," says Avi."
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Neal Stephenson |
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f3fbd6a
|
Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive wast..
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Neal Stephenson |
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29fab13
|
To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9239402
|
The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way."
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Neal Stephenson |
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89cd1ca
|
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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c2afc9f
|
Cnan knew these gleaners and their types well enough that she could pick them out even in a healthy city. Not always were they the furtive criminals or crazed drunks. Indeed, within her short life, she had seen drunks rise to glorious battle and city fathers turn into ghouls. War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.
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Neal Stephenson |
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4f0fb72
|
A gazebo on top of a welding rig" was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here." --
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Neal Stephenson |
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7af72ee
|
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0178aa2
|
The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores.
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Neal Stephenson |
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cbc3ed1
|
But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous.
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Neal Stephenson |
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5c3dc5a
|
It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through his magic site. "Five guys on it. Headed our way." He fires another round. "Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction, they're not headed our way anymore." Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. "Correction. No boat."
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Neal Stephenson |
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ca65f52
|
I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk.
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Neal Stephenson |
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61cdf67
|
I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.
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mortality
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Neal Stephenson |