Quotes #1

A collection of interesting passages I've come across in the interim.

i.

From Greg Egan's Diaspora:

Inoshiro said, "I feel great compassion for all conscious beings. But there's nothing to be done. There will always be suffering. There will always be death."

"Oh, will you listen to yourself? Always! Always! You sound like that phosphoric acid replicator you fried outside Atlanta!" Yatima turned away, trying to calm down. Ve knew that Inoshiro had felt the death of the fleshers more deeply than ve had. Maybe ve should have waited before raising the subject; maybe it seemed disrespectful to the dead to talk so soon about leaving the Earth behind.

It was too late now, though. Ve had to finish saying what ve'd come here to say.

"I'm migrating to Carter-Zimmerman. What they're doing makes sense, and I want to be part of it."

Inoshiro nodded blithely. "Then I wish you well."

"That's it? Good luck and bon voyage?" Yatima tried to read vis face, but Inoshiro just gazed back with a psychoblast's innocence. "What's happened to you? What have you done to yourself?"
Inoshiro smiled beatifically and held out vis hands. A white lotus flower blossomed from the center of each palm, both emitting identical reference tags. Yatima hesitated, then followed their scent.

It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving ... including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core beliefs' failings.

Analysis with a standard tool confirmed that the outlook was universally self-affirming. Once you ran it you could not change your mind. Once you ran it, you could not be talked out of it.

Yatima said numbly, "You were smarter than that. Stronger than that." But when Inoshiro was wounded by Lacerta, what hadn't ve done that might have made a difference? That might have spared ver the need for the kind of anesthetic that dissolved everything ve'd once been?

Inoshiro laughed. "So what am I now? Wise enough to be weak? Or strong enough to be
foolish?"

"What you are now-" Ve couldn't say it.

What you are now is not Inoshiro.

Yatima stood motionless beside ver, sick with grief, angry and helpless. Ve was not in the fleshers' world anymore; there was no nanoware bullet ve could fire into this imaginary body. Inoshiro had made vis choice, destroying vis old self and creating a new one to follow the ancient meme's dictates, and no one else had the right to question this, let alone the power to reverse it.

Yatima reached out to the scape and crumpled the satellite into a twisted ball of metal floating between them, leaving nothing but the Earth and the stars. Then ve reached out again and grabbed the sky, inverting it and compressing it into a luminous sphere sitting in vis hand.

"You can still leave Konishi." Yatima made the sphere emit the address of the portal to Carter-Zimmerman, and held it out to Inoshiro. "Whatever you've done, you still have that choice."

Inoshiro said gently, "It's not for me, Orphan. I wish you well, but I've seen enough."

Ve vanished.

Yatima floated in the darkness for a long time, mourning Lacerta's last victim. 

Interloper

Yes, the opening is stolen from Singularity Sky, but I've only seen the line, and not read the story. I took it in a entirely different direction as a stream-of-association writing exercise. It happened to coalesce into a coherent narrative. Oops.

Interloper

"We will weave our failures into futures."

“Thou shalt not violate causality in my domain”. Or so commands the third or fourth item (I honestly can't remember) on the constitution of this dingy little backwater monarchy. It's a slithy little law, it might even be called clever, if anyone it concerns would actually follow it.
If you had told me any political leader would remain in power after the first Interloper stopped by, I wouldn't have believed you. Doubly so, if you had told that same first guy would strike up a deal with them, effectively cementing the same powers you'd expect to be destroyed. But, being entirely honest, I didn't care. Might makes right. Well, at least here, it does. Being in the Hierarchy gives you a free pass on almost everything, except when someone more important than you starts paying attention. Enforcer. That effectively summarized my job description: playing right hand to anyone higher up on the Hierarchy (which, for me, was everyone). I had to (scratch that, I get to; positive thinking) go around and collect taxes, bully troublemakers and do whatever errands come up. Sometimes, maybe once a month or so, I have to get to tackle an honest-to-god Interloper, with a capital I. An Interloper is, generally speaking, anyone with some kind of special supernormal ability, but it almost exclusively refers to the ones with abilities relating to time, information or minds. In other words, the only ones capable of doing anything worthy of note. The Hierarchy has it's own interlopers (with a lowercase i) who deal with the dissidents. It's sensible, really. Precognitive interference is a well-known phenomena, and it's hard to read the mind of someone whose brain strolled right on past human limits a long time ago. But, any upstart precog or psychic could easily do enough damage to be an embarrassment. Or be enough of a pain to remove to get grandfathered into the Hierarchy. This, of course, means we typically scramble to take out any and every Anomaly that turns up. Which, to make a long story short, is why I'm currently strutting through dilapidated underground tunnels.

Aegri Somnia Vana

Epistemic Status: Fiction
Errata: Changed the title not to be a horrible pun. Check the URL if you're curious.

--

This isn't over and I'm not dead. I just needed to post something, so here's a little vignette I wrote while bored in class.
P̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶e̶x̶c̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶o̶r̶r̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶p̶u̶n̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶t̶e̶n̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶i̶t̶l̶e̶.̶

i.

Location: somewhere cinematic with dramatic cliffs overlooking a sunset on the ocean.

I heard the click of the gun pressed to my temple. How had he sneaked up on me like that? I needed to know that trick.

A moment passed.

"Why not shoot?" I said.

How to Fight Fate

Epistemic Status: Likely

i.

Imagine you're in one of those ancient tragedies. Y'know, the ones with prophecies and fate and stuff.

Yeah, I know, prophecy is so last paradigm and considered harmful and so on. Just stick with me here.

Suppose you're walking down the road, minding your own business, and you happen to walk by some two-bit oracle. Then, all-of-a-sudden, their eyes roll back and they speak in the classic deep, inhuman voice of prophecy. It's something about how some horrible event shall betide thee; maybe "thou shalt killeth thine heir" or something similarly cliché. Let's just go with that as an example.

Generally, prophecies are infallible, and this one is no different. Thus, you know with certainty that the aforementioned tragedy shalt come to pass. Maybe thou'll accidentally your child in a sparring match, when you're just simply trying to show them the ropes. Perhaps thine child will commit some unforgivable crime, and you must sentence them to death. Or you just lose your temper with them at the wrong time.

They will die by your hand, is what I'm saying.

However, you're also well-read enough to know how these patterns typically resolve. Subverting a prophecy never works. If you forego the sparring match, your child will die unprepared in battle. If you exonerate them of their crime, ve'll recidivate. Or you just won't be there to save them while avoiding them.

You'd be hoist by your own petard, is what I'm saying.

Thou canst not flee either. Mayhaps if thou runeth to the hills, your child attempts a desperate search, and by a thoroughly bizarre sequence of coincidences you mistake them for a bandit, and realize only when it's too late.

Even if you attempt suicide, your child, unable to live with the grief, will do likewise.

The game was rigged. Fate was the original master of the Xantos gambit.[1]

[1] Warning: TVtropes