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2cd7b1b
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This is rural England, after all; please set your watch back thirty years
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Charles Stross |
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13359d2
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They'll like it even less if I hear any words from them," I said. You have to be firm with colonial troops: they have only as much backbone as their commanding officer."
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Charles Stross |
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cec8cbe
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Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer?
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tank
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Charles Stross |
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c965304
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We are, after all, .
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Charles Stross |
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1715617
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demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it.
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Charles Stross |
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77617cf
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So you open your mouth and listen to yourself say, "I want eight thousand a day. Plus expenses." This is the polite, industry-standard way of saying "piss off, I'm not interested." You did the math over your morning coffee: You want to earn 100K a year, what with those bonuses you've been pulling on top of your salary. (Besides, a euro doesn't buy what it used to.) There are 250 working days in a year, and a contractor works for roughly 40 ..
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salary-negotiation
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Charles Stross |
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642e1bd
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Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention.
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Charles Stross |
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3401aa6
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It was one of ours originally, but no human being can sprint around a building with their helmet off and backpack missing in a fimbulwinter cold enough to freeze liquid oxygen.
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Charles Stross |
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5ee9f33
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Lockhart twitches. "I do not think Stockholm syndrome means quite what you think it means." "What, the tendency of people--usually women--in unfamiliar societies to enculturate rapidly?" Lockhart inclines his head. "Point."
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Charles Stross |
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ae8f2d6
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What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?
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Charles Stross |
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8de3bef
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a man cannot make himself believe a lie just because it profits him. Men
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Charles Stross |
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552c93c
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when you're sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention.
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Charles Stross |
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a8f5d17
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Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it's better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.
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Charles Stross |
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7c3bcad
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Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes," his grandmother replies bleakly. "Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern of life." --
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taxes
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Charles Stross |
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b398dc6
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Summer in England THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar's tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman's skull, and so on.
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Charles Stross |
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b75b3c7
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over-endowed with WOMBATs." (A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it's parenthesized despair all the way down.)))"
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Charles Stross |
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ef256be
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Anyway, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD," Karim grumps. "You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way--"
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Charles Stross |
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6e93c83
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What band does the necromancer dance to? Boney M.)
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Charles Stross |
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dd4ac0b
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his beard is about thirty centimeters long, grizzled and salted and bifurcated. It has so much character that it's probably being hunted by a posse of typographers.
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Charles Stross |
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1877617
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I don't have a license to kill, but I don't have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;
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Charles Stross |
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dbfc192
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You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there'll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers.
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Charles Stross |
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ee7cf92
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You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It's one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.
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Charles Stross |
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a72616f
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Olga noticed Mirium looking at her blankly. 'Don't you pray?' she asked. 'Pray?' Mirium shook her head. 'I don't understand - ' 'Prayers! Oh, yes, I forgot. Didn't dear Roland say that on the other side everybody is pagan? You all worship some dead god on a stick, impaled or something disgusting, and pray in English,' she said with relish.
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Charles Stross |
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a699528
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Um. Oh dear." "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "I don't know. Are you thinking, goats are kind of like sheep with bad attitude? I'm not a fucking chupacabra, man."
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Charles Stross |
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be8c318
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Horror fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contrast allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over the overwhelming threats that permeate their universe.
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Charles Stross |
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888a8a5
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A young filly is leading her mater in. They're both wearing green wellies, and there's something so indefinably horsey about them that I have to pinch myself and remember that were-ponies do not exist outside the pages of a certain bestselling kid-lit series.
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Charles Stross |
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329b38c
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I notice that Andy is watching our exchange with the still, silent fascination of a fly on the wall that is canny enough to be aware of the existence of swatters.
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Charles Stross |
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9dc3519
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Because if there's one thing worse than an IT manager who's feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it's an IT manager who's getting creative.
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Charles Stross |
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7029fd3
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the first law of demonology is that if you can see it, it can see you. But
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Charles Stross |
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d6f4243
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Oh yes, and compulsory ferret-legging down the pub on Tuesday evenings, for the tourist trade tha' knows." "Ferret-legging?" Rachel looked at him incredulously. "Yup. You tie your kilt up around your knees with duct tape--as you probably know, no Yorkshireman would be seen dead wearing anything under his sporran--and take a ferret by the scruff of his neck. A ferret, that's like, uh, a bit like a mink. Only less friendly. It's a young man's..
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Charles Stross |
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19a6324
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There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices. ... I suspect, to be blunt, someone was blackmailing him.
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Charles Stross |
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0a37255
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They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university?
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Charles Stross |
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a2291ad
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Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration, too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet.
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robots
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Charles Stross |
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06de187
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Please excuse my lack of depth; I'm a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff--or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying--when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?)
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Charles Stross |
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ca6b6e1
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I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.
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identity
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Charles Stross |
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3c8dc08
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I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn't entirely human). However this is the first time I've seen a Word document eat a man's soul.
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Charles Stross |
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31115fe
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let slip the yapping chihuahuas of infowar
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charles stross |
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c724fd5
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Reasons for cancellation order: 1. Baby-eating aquatic faerie equines do not exist.
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Charles Stross |
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5d9026a
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Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath.
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Charles Stross |
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b98b3a1
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Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she's late? It doesn't normally take her this long to terminate an employee.
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Charles Stross |
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df3fa15
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Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life.
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Charles Stross |
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c71283c
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They were brilliant, widely read, incisive, and effortlessly effective analysts and programmers. Which is another reason why, ultimately, so many people died.
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Charles Stross |
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b316cdf
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There's an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I'm driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart's town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb.
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Charles Stross |
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2488311
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There's an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I'm driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart's town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb. I twitch spasmod..
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Charles Stross |