William Gibson

Quotes

1. “You should be a weatherman,” Leon said, “you’re in the future and you know the weather.”

   “You’re someone who only pretends to be unintelligent,” Netherton said. “It serves you simultaneously as protective coloration and a medium for passive aggression. It won’t work with me.”

   “Future’s fucking snippy.”

2. 

   "Cursion, when they were as legit as they ever really were, lived down in the underbrush. Still do, but their new coloration’s gaming. Sometimes, if DoD doubles down hard enough on the deniability, there’s zero memory left of the original mission. The op drifts free of the department, unfunded, forgotten…I figure Cursion took the keys to something with them, when they drifted on DoD. Or maybe drifted back, long enough to lift something. Tulpagenics would be their front for monetizing it.”

   “It?”

   “Me."

3. 

   “Why’re you here?”

   “Thing is,” Tommy said, “strangers keep getting killed out this way.”

   Flynne looked at him, stuck for what to say.

   “Why, if you don’t mind my asking, have you been sleeping, if that was sleeping, with some kind of sugarloaf cake on your head? And what, and this is what I’ve really been wanting to ask somebody for the last little while, the actual fuck is going on out here? Out here, in town, over in Clanton, at the statehouse.”

   “We aren’t builders.”

   “The basic flow of cash in the county’s changed, Flynne, and I mean overnight. So pardon my jumping to conclusions.”

4. 

   So now they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway.

5. 

   “Got a go-bag?” Eunice asked.

   “I haven’t had my own place for the past year…Living out of a bag. That count?”

   “We had go-bags in our go-bags,” Eunice said, “depending.”

   “On what?”

   “Where we were going,” Eunice said.

6. 

   From the crest of Dolores Park, Verity wondered if she could see the tower on Montgomery, where Gavin had first described the product that had turned out to be Eunice.

   There was no one for Eunice to facially recognize, looking out across the city, but the cursor, having become a white circle, was darting around the skyline, trapping invisible airborne somethings under a plus sign.

   “Birds?” Verity asked.

   “Drones."

7. 

   “I like it,” Stets said. “A Silicon Valley ghost story, assuming Eunice is real.”

   “Thing is,” Eunice said, “I’m here. Realness is kinda sorta.”

   “So why here, exactly, right now?” he asked.

   “I want to know where I come from. The infrastructure. Be some Area 51 shit, for real.”

8. 

   The peripheral’s eyes opened wide. “Christ on a corndog,” it said, raising large hands until it could see them. It wiggled the fingers of both. "Goddamn. Look at all these fingers.”

9. 

   Passing a laptop’s screen, Verity saw the president, seated at her desk in the Oval Office, explaining something. If it wasn’t the hurricane hitting Houston, the earthquake in Mexico, the other hurricane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst wildfires in California history, it was Qamishli.

   Increasingly, though, it seemed mainly to be Qamishli.

10. 

    When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.

11. 

    “It’s not a dream,” Flynne said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a dream. Don’t know that any of us are okay.”

    “Never sprained anything in a dream,” Conner said.

12. 

    “We’ve sourced something field-expedient,” Ash began, “from what little’s available there…She’s a surprisingly advanced product of the early militarization of machine intelligence…They saw it as cloning complexly specific skill sets.”

    Netherton nodded, hoping his eyes weren’t visibly glazing.

    “There were, for instance, individuals adroit at managing what were termed competitive control areas…complexly volatile environments, where you might easily lose prized field operators. Hence a project to replace such operators with autonomous AI, piped directly into the goggles of local recruits.”