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7ea81e3
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Hopefully we don't end up as someone else's dinner." For a moment I feel a stab of remorse for the lamb: born into an infinite, hostile universe and destined from birth to be nothing more than fodder for uncaring alien intelligences vaster by far than it can comprehend. "'Scuse me, I'm having a Heather Mills moment here." Mo"
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Charles Stross |
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c28710f
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Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?
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Charles Stross |
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1af7385
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To a many-angled one, we impoverished entities who are stranded in three-plus-one dimensions are fairly harmless; nevertheless, even the inhabitants of flatland can inflict a nasty paper cut upon the unwary on occasion.
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Charles Stross |
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e046bf0
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No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complac..
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Charles Stross |
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025d8af
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Some knowledge is inherently corrupting,
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Charles Stross |
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d908b84
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But I can't be in three places at once!" "Tough," says Mo, and that shell-like expression cracks into a grin. "You're management now; isn't it time you learned to delegate?"
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Charles Stross |
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24c935d
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I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed--Amazon logging every page turn and annotation--was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on. The
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Charles Stross |
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85d81c6
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his arms. Human. Cat. Human. 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.
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Charles Stross |
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3ba27bd
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What is this eigenplot you keep talking about? I ask. I'm dangerously close to whining. I really hate it when everyone else around me seems to know more about what's going on than I do. The geas Billington's running. It's the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence.
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Charles Stross |
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e1cbfb3
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Ah, the warm fuzzies of decisive action.
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Charles Stross |
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cfb5887
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April 5th. You know what that means to me? That means the budget for the project expired at the end of financial year 1968 and was not renewed. (Yes, British government budgets--and the tax year--start on April 6th. Why are you looking at me like that? Don't your tax years start and stop on a random date in April?) I
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Charles Stross |
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673186c
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The most efficient kind of censorship isn't the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it's the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we're afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.
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Charles Stross |
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98a7f4d
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I'm a believer. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos--in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever--was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I'll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I'm keeping the last shell for myself. A
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Charles Stross |
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66a06a2
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And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done.
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Charles Stross |
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2d0c630
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La culpa es mia por ser el informatico del departamento: cuando las maquinas se estropean, agito mi pollo muerto y escribo encantamientos vudu en los teclados hasta que vuelven a funcionar.
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Charles Stross |
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161a9a7
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Toma un puro, Sherlock. - Lo siento; solo echo humo cuando me enchufan a la red electrica.
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Charles Stross |
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f2215af
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Es que no saben que el unico ordenador inhackeable es el que tiene instalado un sistema operativo seguro y esta encerrado en una caja fuerte de acero enterrada bajo una tonelada de hormigon en el fondo de una mina de carbon protegida por los SAS y un par de divisiones armadas, y ademas esta apagado?
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Charles Stross |
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23f3ba2
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We still have cultural attaches?" "We still have pulse-dialing electromechanical Strowger telephone exchanges in the basement"--Lockhart startles me by suddenly rattling off the correct but decades-obsolete terminology--"just in case we experience a need for such equipment. And you are now discovering just why we also have cultural attaches in the embassy in DC." "Ri-ight." I glance at the first boarding pass. "Hey,"
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Charles Stross |
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7490956
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Los idiotas emiten bogones que hacen que las maquinas se estropeen en su presencia. Los administradores de sistema absorben los bogones, lo que permite que las maquinas vuelvan a funcionar.
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Charles Stross |
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cdbb91a
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Then the red light comes on above the camera, and I'm live on a Monday evening special crisis edition of Newsnight.
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Charles Stross |
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cda2783
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Our worshipers have met this British agent before. Do not attempt to convert him; bring him alive before Us. He will be of great service in the end times ahead.*** Schiller
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Charles Stross |
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183d807
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the defense establishment of the United States of America is so complicated, not to say baroque, that many different agencies can accomplish any given task. Want to invade a small Caribbean island? Who you gonna call: the Army or the Navy's Army, which is to say, the Marine Corps? Want to call in an air strike? You could ask the Air Force ... but the US Navy has lots and lots of fighter jets and tends to get annoyed if they're left out. And..
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Charles Stross |
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b5a1bab
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There are one and a half billion Muslims on this Earth. A billion and a half Chinese communists, a billion Indian Hindu elephant-worshippers. One point two billion Catholics, misled by the Vatican. And I'm afraid they're all going to go to hell if we don't manage to save them in time. This is a tragedy; the great, besetting tragedy of our age is that at least ninety-five percent of currently living humanity is going to burn in hell. To make..
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Charles Stross |
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429bc37
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As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you're a child.
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Charles Stross |
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a0f20a6
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now my blood ran cold. 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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fcf9dcb
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But otherwise it's darkness, darkness, as far as the eye can see.
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Charles Stross |
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ae1b0eb
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and go looking for a potted plant that appears hardy enough to survive being irrigated with the stuff.
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Charles Stross |
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9561afe
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But what are we going to do with a load of guns?" asks Pete. "I don't know, Brains, what are we going to do with a half-track full of guns?" Pinky asks. Brains chuckles. "Same thing we do every night, Pinky--" "Fort up and wait for reinforcements," Pinky says flatly."
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Charles Stross |
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38380f4
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There are all sorts of other things, investigations into silent movies and TV serials (I pulled the file on "Quatermass" for shits and giggles--strictly speaking not germane to the project in hand, but I'd hit burn-out by that point and badly needed some relief reading that wasn't the eleventh Harry Dresden novel)."
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Charles Stross |
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7a3c0a3
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Martian invasion: sure, the Army understands what it needs to do, if not necessarily how to go about it. Religious apocalypses involving the Four Horsemen: pass the holy water and bend over, here it comes again. But invasion by the armies of Middle Earth--who ordered that?
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Charles Stross |
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ea221e3
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It's lovely, like the moment of stunned disbelief immediately after you finally snap and tell the world's most annoying office-mate to shut the fuck up--the moment of silence when they have no comeback and you finally had the last word.
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Charles Stross |
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d81c80b
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If they're smart enough to be useful they get ideas about making themselves indispensable--ideas about getting above their station, as you Brits would put it. If they're too dumb to be useful they're a drain on your management time. All corporations are an economy of attention, from the top down.
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Charles Stross |
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544efca
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By dawn on Sunday he had been awake for over thirty hours, tracking a crisis of ever-expanding but indeterminate scope. A large body of operational research demonstrates that human beings suffer disproportionately from fatigue-induced errors of judgment after twelve hours of concentration at work; while Gerald Lockhart had long experience of pushing himself under crisis conditions, he was about to make a fatal mistake.
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Charles Stross |
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1a757d3
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Are you a psychiatrist?" "I don't think so." He shuffles forward, heading towards a side bay that, as I approach it, turns out to be a day room of some sort. "Then I'm not Napoleon Bonaparte!"
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Charles Stross |
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5261c28
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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 that fires Porsches and Mercedes.
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Charles Stross |
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53047ff
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For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we've assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar.
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Charles Stross |
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4c8edb1
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After a few seconds to savor his self-derailment, Derek gets back on course.
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Charles Stross |
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5e78d10
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One moment you're cruising along effortlessly at thirty thousand feet while the cabin crew slosh the whisky around in business class, the next you're in a screaming death-spiral with flames pouring from the hole where the starboard engine was meant to be before some toe-cheese puked a missile up its exhaust. It takes a little time to switch mode from business-as-usual to six-alarms-emergency if you're not primed to expect it,
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Charles Stross |
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9429bce
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And he's maneuvered Old George into a position where the only way to safety lies through the New Annex. Things are about to get very messy indeed, for blood-on-the-walls values of messy.
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Charles Stross |
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783a083
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Give me a bottle of Mountain Dew, an MP3 player hammering out something by VNV Nation, and a crate of Pringles: that's like being at home. Give me root access on a hostile necromancer's server farm, and I am at home.
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Charles Stross |
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82ef162
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Imagine, Sir David, the end of all you ever wanted brought about because an idiot banker did not prioritize highly enough a simple request from their master . . .
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Charles Stross |
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97796b6
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That's all right, pay no attention to me, just make yourself at home," I tell the self-propelled whoopee cushion, then audit the itemized receipt with a sinking heart. Judging from the bottom line, cats fall somewhere between a new Porsche and a used Lamborghini in running costs, and I've got a nasty suspicion that I'm not going to be able to expense this claim. I mean, I might be able to concoct an experimental protocol that involves hosti..
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Charles Stross |
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2e1489a
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Or was it running the world's weirdest Turing-complete variant Dungeons & Dragons campaign using a rule set isomorphic with first-order transdimensional summoning algebra--
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Charles Stross |
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77b4073
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you've got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives.
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Charles Stross |