William Gibson

Quotes

1. Netherton said nothing, something he’d only recently been learning to deliberately do.

2. 

   “Turkey and Syria weirding you out?…Folks in Frankfurt made me feel like the Cold War never really went away. Somebody shoots down a couple of Russian jets, wham, it’s Cold War Atlantis, risen from the depths.”

3. 

   “What’s going on?” asked Manuela, eyeing the container’s door. “Is this a cult? Kidnapping people and telling them somebody’s after them?”

   “Let me think about it,” Verity said.

   “You’re kidnapped too? Let’s fucking escape!”

4. 

   “Given this city, and the things most of us do, you’ll have heard that before, ambitious people announcing something innovative, something they believe will drive change, but something they generally haven’t accomplished yet. This isn’t that. This isn’t a pitch.”

5. 

   “There’s lots of people happier with a dumbfuck in the White House…The people who were the most trouble, under Gonzalez, aren’t unhappy enough, now, to be much trouble at all,” Janice shrugged. “Life in the county, life in these United States.”

6. 

   “Hi. I’m Eunice. No last name. Siri and Alexa don’t have ’em either, but the resemblance stops there. I’m an AI-upload hybrid…I’m here because I’m something new, and because I want to introduce myself before anyone else starts explaining their idea of me to you. While I’m at it, I’d like to say that I’m nobody’s property, not a product…I pay my own way…I’m globally distributed, and that’s how I view my citizenship…Whether I’m a person, it feels to me like I am. Me. Eunice.” She smiled.

   Everyone in the audience silent, except for a baby crying, toward the back of the crowd. Then people began to applaud.

7. 

   The city so quiet, in that moment, that he could hear the gulls.

   Then a car passed, an antique Rolls, unoccupied, its driver a dash-top homunculus, in what he took to be a tiny chauffeur’s uniform.

   He walked on, intent on milk, his dreams of skating forgotten.

8. 

   “You’re too young to remember it,” her mother said, “but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.”

   “But it didn’t happen. That war,” Verity said.

   “Decades of background dread did.”

9. 

   “Guys, I’m gonna pretend like all of you are incapacitated or unconscious. And if none of you makes a move, I’ll be leaving you to your own resources. Otherwise, this drone’s detonating its onboard explosives. As the only one of us who’s not physically present, I’ve got zero fucks to give about how that goes. Your call.

   "We’re muted now,” Conner said to Netherton.

   Thomas started to cry, in the nursery. “I need to see to my son,” said Netherton, getting up.

   “You do that,” said Conner, sounding as if he were enjoying his evening.

10. 

    Money launderers, in Netherton’s experience of Flynne’s stub, were the sort of people least destabilized by discovering that their world was a branch of someone else’s. They immediately looked for advantage in the knowledge.

11. 

    “What are you doing?” Netherton asked, reminded of how Conner made him uneasy.

    “Running systems checks,” Conner said. “This is a fabbed-up repro of something at least six generations behind the oldest I ever piloted, but the software looks like it’s either ours or we’ve rewritten it. Seriously fucked up…but I meant 'fucked up' like I can’t fucking wait to use it.”

12. 

    “Conner’s up there telepresently,” Verity said.

    “So what you’re doing is some new way to give TED talks? Like theater, with really random props and locations?”

    “He’s using something like the iPads on wheels, but more like one of those dogs, except it’s got arms and two legs.”

    “So where is he, physically?”

    “D.C. Washington.”

    Manuela winced. “Please.”