Great North Road

How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats did it take to change a light panel? We'll have a sub-committee meeting and get back to you with an estimate.

HR?' 'Human Resources.' 'In Brussels that kind of department is referred to as the Office for Personkind Enablement. Resources sounds like something you dig out of the ground.

She couldn't organize an orgy in a brothel.

This is the age of total digitalisation; everything is online always.' 'Uh huh, and that's why our politicians are pure and clean, and the world works so well, is it? Because everybody knows everything and there's no hiding place.

Alien Affairs. Bad name I always thought, makes it sound like they're shagging them rather than investigating them.

The military do so love shiny new technology, there's always so many ways to abuse it.

Random Acts of Kindness," he said. "You need some in your life. Everybody does." "No, I don't have much of a rak, but hey, this is the twenty-third century, you can get anything fixed if you have enough money.

What's a lightwave ship?" "UFO, basically." "Cool," Angela said.

Ego had brought him to this point, that stupid refusal to quit the case, to simply do the job according to procedure and pick up the monthly salary transfer. Now look where it had brought him, sitting right next to a crapping great fusion bomb.

...Aldersgate Street, the bottom of the A1 - which was the modern designation of the original Great North Road, built by the Romans two thousand years ago to march its garrisons to the very edge of the empire three hundred miles to the north. Their duty was to reinforce Hadrian's Wall, keeping the outer darkness at bay and the empire safe.

Taxis are useful in this town, aren’t they?” Clayton mused. “So perfectly anonymous. And they all look the same.

Ian kept his brain in his dick,

Everybody in the GE used secondaries. It was part of the culture now; socially acceptable. There had been many attempts by the Brussels parliament to legislate against it, and the Tax Bureau certainly did its best. But of course, if a method had been found to clear up people’s finances and put them on a hundred per cent legitimate, transparent basis, it would have worked for everyone, politicians and tax officials included.

Ian chuckled. “You know what the world’s greatest oxymoron is?” “Happily married,” Sid said wearily.

The dead hand of society’s inertia and the financial interest of the elite minority hold us back as a species. They govern us so they can continue to govern us.

Another religious fanatic to whom facts and reality took second place to dogma.

Vance closed the link and stamped off to biolab-1, too furious to say anything more. He didn’t even ask the Lord for wisdom and guidance, which was remiss of him, but the Lord would understand the frailty of human reaction in the face of such outrageous provocation.

It’s only going to take another week of this and we’re going to have the mother of all humanitarian crises on our hands. The Independencies are already living on food stocks that aren’t going to last long. The algaepaddies can’t survive prolonged cooling, which is going to eliminate ten percent of GE’s bioil supply. Most of Highcastle is already camped out by the gateway demanding to return. And nobody is making any decisions, certainly not in the GE. Every commissioner is running scared of a decision. Right now they’re having summits about holding summits on what to do. I’ve never seen anything so pathetic. Even the licensed news shows are sneering.” Vance