[b]Neal Stephenson
Did you win your sword fight?
Of course I won the fucking sword fight, Hiro says. I’m the greatest sword fighter in the world.
And you wrote the software.
Yeah. That, too, Hiro says.[/b]
The new warriors.
I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.
There might as well be, Arsibalt said, but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.
Yet another brutal fact of life.
That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.
For some, even more than occasionally.
The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.
Dust? How the fuck does he figure that?
Let’s set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.
Fortunately or unfortunately, that’s us.
Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.
Or: Well, all noise looks like information until you break the code.
Or, sure, maybe not.