Charles Stross

Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.

But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done.

Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.

“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’”

You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.

Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.

Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.

You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches, and getting involved in it only leads to misery and dissatisfaction.

“Freedom?” The word tastes bitter. “What’s freedom ever done for me? Seems to me I’ve been free almost all my life, but what has it gotten me? Really?”

She’s silent for only a moment. “Ask not what it’s gotten you, kid. Ask what it’s saved you from.”

No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.

The number one crime in any age: offending the money.