13 quotes
You keep invoking some God but I don’t think he’s listening right now.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
She’s very good at misdirection, he thinks proudly. The Civil Service has a term for this art: being economical with the truth.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
She has only warped second-hand memories of motion pictures, none of them her own. It seems like a fantastically unproductive use of her time with Alex, staring vacantly at an elaborate visual lie.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
We’re from the Ministry of Defense: our sense of humor is surgically excised at birth.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
“Is the weather always like this?”
“It could be worse. They could be looking at relocating to Manchester, where the locals are evolving webbed fingers and gill slits.”
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made from a chromed baby’s skull.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
We, the structures we collectively refer to as “life,” are patterns of information—temporary reversals of the arrow of entropy within our universe—and conscious minds are the most concentrated such patterns we know of.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
“What happens if we don’t do this?”
“I don’t know. Probably we don’t die. I mean, maybe probably. Possibly maybe probably.”
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
Her heart pounds. Dating, with its conventions of multiple social encounters as a prelude to fucking, seems absurdly complex to her, like cooking your own food rather than having servants and poison-testers prepare it for you.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
In Agent First’s world, the ineluctable law of power is that you rule or you die.
To Agent First, the puppet show of democracy that Cassie believes in is obviously a child’s tissue of attractive lies, set before the cattle to enable the secret rulers to dominate them without fear of uprisings.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
This is the Forecasting Operations Department, where one is supposed to imagine that crystal-ball gazing precognitives may or may not tickle the tummy of Schrödinger’s cat while juggling ampoules full of hydrogen cyanide and giggling madly at the whirling fog bank of the uncertain future.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)
Let’s say they get speech, and they got theory of mind, so they get religion pretty soon, too—an emergent side effect of ascribing intentionality to aspects of their environment. Animism, polytheism, whatever. They probably discover ritual magic pretty fast because their brains are predisposed to modeling complex entities. Abstract thinking.
The Nightmare Stacks (2016)