False Value

Miss Karmargi who’d been my Religious Education teacher at school. An avowed atheist who’d once said that she respected all religions equally—“which is more than can be said for most religions,” she’d added.

After that I was up and ready for action. It might have been a Saturday, but below the rank of chief inspector weekends are an entirely notional concept.

There were a couple of mentions of drones, but the assumption was that they were operated by the police, the gangs, space lizards or all three at once. The media were continuing their comforting lack of interest in things that didn’t fit their various agendas.

He’d obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear.

I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon.

“It’s that vacant expression,” she said. “People just want to fill the empty void.”

“But I want you to be cautious.”

“Hey,” I said. “Cautious is my middle name.”

“But your first name is Never Knowingly,” said Stephanopoulos. Which got all the laughs it deserved.

Nothing beats a long wait at a bus stop as a reality check.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music. —Siri

“Not your type?”

“I’m strictly a case by case kind of guy. But if I had a type it wouldn’t be him.”

And what they don’t want you to know, you definitely want to know.

“There’s no glamour in infrastructure,” he said as he filled our glasses again. “Steve and wee little William, right? They make stuff everyone uses every day but nobody thinks about the plumbing until it goes wrong.”

Policing is about moving from the unknown to the known and then further—to the provable.

“Are you smarter than me?”

“I’ll answer that when you give me a working definition of intelligence.”

God, I thought, Mum’s going to be upset if the rapture arrives and Jesus looks like Robin Williams.

From a policing point of view, 3-D printers were your classic new technology. Everybody knew they were going to be used by criminals for something, but nobody was sure what.

“That’s assuming that the Singularity hasn’t already happened,” said Victor. “And we’re not sentient virtual personalities inhabiting a simulation of reality.”

“How would we know?” I said.

The prisons are full of people with poor impulse control and a lack of foresight.

What was a billionaire supposed to do? There was a limit to the effectiveness of charity, and paying more taxes just meant the government wasted your money on bureaucracy and cushy jobs for civil servants.

“An AGI?” I asked, because at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going “Daisy-Daisy” and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. —Anonymous

Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.

I asked Reynolds if she could put the bodyguards on what we’d taken to calling the Unreality List of people that might be magical, members of the demi-monde or suspiciously weird.

“It would save ever so much time,” Reynolds had said when we set it up, “if we just added the population of Florida right at the start.”

“The timing might not be significant,” I said. “Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re related.”

Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching when you want him to.

“When you say shades, what do you mean?” I asked. “Do you mean Fae?”

“I mean everything that’s not normal,” said Mrs. Chin.

“Like New Jersey,” said Stephen.

“I’m a magician, I am,” he said. “I can see things that are really there.”

Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion.

Old Street roundabout is a diamond-shaped circulatory system designed in the late 1960s to thin out the number of cyclists heading in and out of the City. In line with the then-current planning conventions they added a series of mugger-friendly underpasses, an insufficiently wide entrance to Old Street Underground station, and a small shopping arcade lined with urine-attracting beige tile.…

You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.

It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory. They run the wrong way, they refuse to move, some will run toward the danger, and others will instantly whip out their phones and take footage.