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a84ae4d
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The European Parliament responded by focusing on corporate governance. If corporations wanted to be legal citizens they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted and a lucrative niche for a new generation of management consultants emerged - those who could look..
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Charles Stross |
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4149080
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His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. "You have imposter syndrome," He says, "but paradoxically, that's often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It's the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they're on top of the job because they don't understand it."
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Charles Stross |
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e49bdb0
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I wasn't expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins.
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Charles Stross |
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814c64c
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Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can't always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.
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Charles Stross |
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1ae077a
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Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided--for a fee. (In the event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.)
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Charles Stross |
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620165e
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Americans think we Brits drink tea because we're polite and genteel or something, whereas we really drink it because it's a stimulant and it's hot enough to sterilize cholera bacteria.)
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Charles Stross |
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16ff054
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They never tell you how heavy a corpse is in training school.
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Charles Stross |
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86efaaa
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Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
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Charles Stross |
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e2600b0
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All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
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Charles Stross |
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ee91c28
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programming is a job where Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time.
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Charles Stross |
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047ff4e
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So you're saying, we've got a, a shoggoth gap?
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mad
mutually-assured-destruction
shoggoth
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Charles Stross |
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86db772
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every insterstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.
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insterstellar-colony
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Charles Stross |
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02ae95f
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The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
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humor
androids
chip
hammer
soldering
nail
computer
robots
computers
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Charles Stross |
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8af8b13
|
Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas.
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politics
humor
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Charles Stross |
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fccb14b
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She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons.
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Charles Stross |
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147c6ed
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there is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness.
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Charles Stross |
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d17764f
|
American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor--that, and the army is less trigger-happy.
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Charles Stross |
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10356f2
|
Pay attention: There will be an exam later.
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Charles Stross |
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3885fad
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There are two types of people in this world," Pete volunteers helpfully, "those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else."
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Charles Stross |
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a8fbdeb
|
The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?
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ironic-self-reference
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Charles Stross |
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53aaf74
|
The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one's self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer's yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty.
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Charles Stross |
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37ff557
|
He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, but the official Home Office superhero team is going to have to conform to public expectations of what a superhero team should look like, or it's not really going to work terribly well. There's room for one person of color, one female or LGBT, and one disability in a core team of four - if you push it beyond that ratio it'll lose credibility with the crucial sixteen to twenty-four male target demographic, by ..
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Charles Stross |
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ce8c8f8
|
For programming is a job where Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time.
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Charles Stross |
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ae24e25
|
A historian who works for a bank: That's not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it?
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historian
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Charles Stross |
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b70d4e3
|
There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat. These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade. (This i..
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hate
greed
weirdly-prophetic
dictatorship
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Charles Stross |
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b763108
|
He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there's much difference.)
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Charles Stross |
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df7acb5
|
Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)
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passel
pigeons
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Charles Stross |
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8f0a98c
|
Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they're some of the most dangerous folks you can meet... Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction. That name -- Dadaist. It's a dead giveaway. Expect a senseless act of mass violence, the theater of cruelty. About all I can do is try and keep him talking while you get in position to kill him. And don't give him anything he might mistake for an audience." --C..
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Charles Stross |
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f6cf347
|
Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct--except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that listen, and talk back--see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, et cetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the M..
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Charles Stross |
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91cbc20
|
What entity aboard this ship exhibits all the personality traits of a cold-blooded killing machine, combined with the monstrous, overweening vanity and laziness of a convalescent war god lounging in their personal Valhalla while their minions prepare their armor? There's only one answer. The Persian tomcat sits underneath the alien horror, washing itself without concern.
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Charles Stross |
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49def94
|
We shouldn't even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we're management, not heroes.
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Charles Stross |
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56779c5
|
This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization's ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren't, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it's no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It's no consolat..
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Charles Stross |
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a7ba013
|
Look." I pointed. "Shin-Tethys as a whole maintains a positive trade surplus with the rest of the system. A third of the local nations don't export directly, but there's a lot of internal, intramural trade between the tribes--the main six exporters account for eighty-two percent of the uranium and fifty-seven percent of the rare earths. What comes in is, well, lots of skilled labor, finished high-tech assemblies, anything that needs microgr..
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Charles Stross |
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00ae9aa
|
But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.
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Charles Stross |
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1090620
|
Georgina darts forward, grabs my hand, and pumps it up and down while peering at my face as if she's wondering why water isn't gushing from my mouth.
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Charles Stross |
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19df437
|
Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states. "Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?"
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individuality
information-transfer
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Charles Stross |
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b6ff785
|
Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter - but you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it bec..
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Charles Stross |
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96b290d
|
Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
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self-awareness
|
Charles Stross |
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14715bd
|
Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed, The transom was shut, the staff home in repose; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, But St. Nicholas won't be coming because this is a Designated National Security Site within the meaning of Para 4.12 of Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act (Amended) and unauthorised intrusion on such a site is an arrestable offense ...
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Charles Stross |
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e0d31b3
|
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 cannon..
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Charles Stross |
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ddea1da
|
You've just spent an entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many arms?" I shake my head. "I just assume you have a good reason."
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Charles Stross |
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810f702
|
AFTER WE DO THE WASHING-UP, I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they're almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn't stealthily dump core in your shoes.)
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Charles Stross |
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4ccb1c4
|
Never bring a knife to a gun fight," I tell Mr. Crispy as I turn away from him. His right arm thinks about it for a moment, then falls off."
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Charles Stross |
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8523ef7
|
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."
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Charles Stross |