Galactic North

“All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?”

“I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.”

“Only trying to make conversation, friend.”

“Don’t bother—it’s an overrated activity at the best of times.”

Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.

Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?

Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.

Grafenwalder shoots a sidelong glance at Ursula Goodglass, wondering what their marriage must be like. Clearly sex isn’t in the cards, but he doubts that it was ever the main interest in their lives. Games, especially those of prestige and subterfuge, are amongst the chief entertainments of the Rust Belt moneyed.

We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium.

You’ve been good to me, Inigo. But I really am like the weather. You can admire me, even love me, in your way, but I can’t love you back. To me you’re like a photograph. I can see right through you, examine you from all angles. You amuse me. But you don’t have enough depth ever to fascinate me.

“Is he dead?” Irravel asked.

“Depends what you mean by dead.”

Pretty smart piece of thinkware by all accounts: full Turing compliance; about as clever as you can make a machine before you have to start giving it human rights.

War does strange things to truth.