On the Steel Breeze

Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.

I had work to be getting on with. I’ve always had work to be getting on with. It’s what the universe was put there for: to give me things to do.

Venus was a machine for making bad weather.

All her concerns, all her fears, began to feel trifling. It was just a trick of perspective, really, seeing things as they truly were.

They had hardly ever spoken of her life before the the day they met in Belém. It was what they had both agreed on, a relationship built on a solid foundation of mutual ignorance.

Crime is an adaptive organism. Squeeze one niche and it moves into another.

I ran an experiment and I got a result. That’s more useful to us than fifty years of theorising.

I’ll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.

This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate.

“That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.”

“Welcome to politics.”

“I can’t tell you how much happier I’d be meeting a bunch of artificial intelligences if I also happened to have one on my side.”

“Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”

Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.

“Could be worse, as they say.”

“That’s the sum story of human history, isn’t it? Could be worse. As if that’s the very best that we can manage.”

Something that bad, it makes the headlines. They were idiots to bet against physics.