Ben Aaronovitch

“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.

“He was a Parisian,” he said. “You can never be sure what Parisians believe in—beyond Paris of course.”

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.

It was already one of the hazards of being police that you became suspicious of the everyday. You didn’t have to spend much time on the job before realising that professional criminals are comparatively rare and that crime is something committed by ordinary people.

I wondered, not for the first time, whether all farmers become obsessed or if only obsessive people become farmers.

With a rich history like that there was nothing to be done except flatten it and replace it with a shopping arcade designed in the who-the-fuck-cares school of retail architecture. The result was a two-story warehouse with a flat roof designed to maximise floor space and nothing else.