William Gibson

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

“Ash imagines you a conservative,” Lowbeer said, “or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.”

“I simply imagine things were less tedious,” Netherton said.

“I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp."

People who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. Lowbeer had said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded Flynne of what her mother had said…That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room to become its bigger self, with more horrible results.

“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”

“You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar.

Sally looked down. “Yeah.”

“Why don’t you have it removed?”

“Sometimes it’s good to remember.”

“Being hurt?”

“Being stupid.”

The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans.

San Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities.

Everything to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode. When he’d built Skinner’s funicular, the elevator that crawled like a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower, Fontaine had a story about the derivation of each piece. He wove their stories together, applied electricity: the thing rose, clicking, to the hatch in the floor of Skinner’s room.

"It's what we do now instead of bohemias," Harwood says.

"Instead of what?"

"Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies…And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct."

"Extinct?"

"We started picking them before they could ripen…as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters."

Rydell had a theory about virtual real estate. The smaller and cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and cheesier the website.

Something moves in the affectless brown depths of the boy's eyes. The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely.