|
abf062d
|
She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
97f7679
|
Starships are all work and no fun.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
8680545
|
Money. An instrument invented in ancient temple complexes, to keep track of debt: counters that acquired mobility and went a-walking, weaving webs of debt into vast and intricate meshes, enslaving and directing the labor of billions in service of the obligations created by its issuance. . . . Money: a shadow play projected on the walls of our minds by the dark sun of debt.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
ddc70b1
|
Cat. No doubled vision: it's a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
37d13f6
|
Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic sports-star, collectible trading card game art.
|
|
|
Charles Stross Cory Doctorow |
|
b861949
|
We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we've developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we're conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can't live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die.
|
|
humanity
death
religion
life
|
Charles Stross Cory Doctorow |
|
f1eda4e
|
Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse.
|
|
computers
it
help
|
Charles Stross Cory Doctorow |
|
14740e6
|
I've met gibbering horrors from other universes, been psychically entangled with a serial killer fish goddess, stalked by zombies, imprisoned by a megalomaniac billionaire, and I've even survived the attention of the Auditors (when I was young, foolish, and didn't know any better). But I've never lost a classified file before, and I don't ever want there to be a first time. I force myself to sit down
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
f4f5916
|
Executions are a form of human sacrifice, after all,
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
f39294d
|
There's a very loud noise in my ear, not unlike a cat sneezing, if the cat is the size of the Great Sphinx of Giza and it's just inhaled three tons of snuff.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
6ad40f2
|
you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?"
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
b353f1a
|
A mother's love--" "Fuck love," Amber snarls, "she wants power."
|
|
power
|
Charles Stross |
|
c16ce61
|
It's not as if he's had much of a chance until now, but somehow he has internalized the ur-cultural narrative: you grow up, go to university, get a job, meet Ms. Right, get married, settle down, have kids, grow old together . . . it's like some sort of checklist. Or maybe a list of epic quests you've got to complete while level-grinding in a game you're not allowed to quit, with no respawns and no cheat codes.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
038d9d7
|
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
04e1ae8
|
Growing old is natural," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage li..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
03fca61
|
When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they're agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers--not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble--but at the back end, we're in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers' biggest problems are mainta..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
8529de3
|
Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
63ccf68
|
We have chickens! And ostriches--they're like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyrannosaur--that's like a really huge chicken, with teeth--but for architectural reasons we can't let it roam free just yet.
|
|
megafauna
would-pet
|
Charles Stross |
|
ac8994e
|
silly me, I wasn't expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
95e6e82
|
We developed differently, of course, but we all had the same problem." The yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives. "How can you love yourself if you can't love somebody else?"
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
79f5e43
|
Superman, Iron Man, Batman"--Flyaway Hair winces visibly--"you name it. Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals."
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
bb362f6
|
As Terry Pratchett observed, inside every eighty-year-old man is an eight-year-old wondering what the hell just happened to him; in
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
33617d2
|
This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
31429bd
|
The final vanity. This whole episode has never been about us. Can't you see? If this is happening now, it must have happened over and over. Who knows how many other planets we lost in the past, consumed as weapons of forgotten wars? Maybe all we see, the planets and stars and galaxies, is just the debris of huge wars - on and on, up to scales we can barely imagine. And we're just weeds growing in the rubble. Tell that to the Prime Minister...
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
827ef84
|
Maybe solitude is the key to it all. A galactic isolation imposed by the vast gulfs between the stars, the lightspeed limit. As a species develops you might have a brief phase of individuality, of innovation and technological achievement. But then, when the universe gives you nothing back, you turn in on yourself, and slide into the milky embrace of eusociality - the hive. "But what then? How would it be for a mass mind to emerge, alone? Ma..
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
790b50f
|
Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty
|
|
humour
|
Charles Stross |
|
5b45264
|
Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
12f88f2
|
Then the screen comes on, showing a familiar menu on a blue background and I stare at it, transfixed, like a yokel who's never seen a television before. Because it's not a TV. It's a flat-screen PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition. They can't be that dumb. It's got to be a trap, I gibber to myself. Not even the clueless cannon-fodder-in-jumpsuits who staff any one of the movies on the shelf would be that dumb!
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
97ffc9e
|
Identity is theft, don't trust anyone whose state vector hasn't forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.
|
|
identity-theft
|
Charles Stross |
|
40512c0
|
Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened."
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
34cd49e
|
And because my employers agree with me, and they're the government, you're outvoted.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
ab5e7ac
|
A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment--with its redefinition of personhood--is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.
|
|
slavery
upload
personhood
property
ownership
|
Charles Stross |
|
4a6ae78
|
Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn't turn into a voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of space--at least, not unless they've done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
f7909dc
|
First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life--oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.
|
|
death
|
Charles Stross |
|
55cc116
|
Only debt is forever.
|
|
forever
|
Charles Stross |
|
1731df2
|
butcher, baker, fusion-reactor maker.
|
|
butcher
|
Charles Stross |
|
200b511
|
Private ownerships of a ...slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.
|
|
violence
slavery
|
Charles Stross |
|
394a794
|
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!" "It's"
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
7213c6a
|
I try not to notice the exploded eyeballs or the ruptured tongue bursting through the blackened lips. This job is quite gross enough as it is without adding my own dry heaves to the mess.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
f4d972e
|
But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
81a5cfd
|
I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
2b0aca7
|
WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES. In our youth, if we survive them, they're called learning experiences or teachable moments or some-such. And that which does not maim or kill us usually makes us stronger, albeit sometimes also sadder and more cynical.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
15ad76d
|
Some people you just do not want to leave outside the tent pissing in, and in my early twenties, self-confident and naive, I was about as safe to leave lying around unsupervised as half a ton of sweating gelignite.
|
|
|
Charles Stross |
|
f747ab2
|
NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-..
|
|
mind-uploading
terraforming
space
|
Charles Stross |