The Peripheral

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.

Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said.

If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.” “You

So now, in her day, he said, 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.

Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.” “I’ve

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn’t tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

What Shaylene saw as Burton’s primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out.

And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.

Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke.

A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata,

I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. —H. G. WELLS

It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it.

You're from the future, Mr Netherton?" "Not exactly," he said. "I'm in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn't your future. Here.

a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one.

History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.

Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other.

He gestured for it to sit. The bench vibrated briefly in anticipation, shedding drops of rain. The peripheral sat.

That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.

Those fuckers,” Janice said, meaning the football players, “they get me doing hate Kegels.

terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.

Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt

Something stilled the part of him that knitted narrative, that grew the underbrush of lies in which he lived.

Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art.” They walked on. “I think that already happened, back home,

but Leon wasn’t due any disability. Wasn’t, their mother said, like he could claim to have caught the dumbfuck there. Not