Woken Furies

We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?

Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They’ve all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it’s not. It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow. And no one ever does that, because they’re all too fucking scared of losing their conning tower moment in the historical process. If you tear down one agglutinative power dynamic and put another one in its place, you’ve changed nothing. You’re not going to solve any of that society’s problems, they’ll just reemerge at a new angle. You’ve got to set up the nanotech that will deal with the problems on its own. You’ve got to build the structures that allow for diffusion of power, not re-grouping. Accountability, demodynamic access, systems of constituted rights, education in the use of political infrastructure

Kovacs to a female believer in New Revelation: "..I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crapshit. But you? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing

it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.

This enemy you cannot kill,” I murmured. He nodded and finished the quote for me. “You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.

Rage at injustice is a forest fire — it jumps all divides, even those between generations.

The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterward.

Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash

Religion’s just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can’t do the same when it comes to the crunch. These people are sheep. They’ll do whatever their holy men tell them.

It's always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse.

I imagine they're pretty much insane by now. Can't be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you're fighting tooth and nail for your life in a mud pit. I doubt there's much conscious human mind left.' Vidaura looked down into her lap. 'Is that what you tell yourself?' 'No, it's just a theory.' I shrugged. 'Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is some conscious mind left. Maybe there's a lot left. Maybe in their more lucid moments they think they've gone to hell. Either way suits me.

No, I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crabshit. But you? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing.

Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative—which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys—but they weren’t any kind of pushover, either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.

Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the drug-like grip of a decision taken and what it meant.

You should be lying down,” I said as she joined me. “Yeah, but they missed. So I’m not. Don’t give me a hard time, Kovacs.

Skip it. We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?

Forty years ago, before I went away, you could get the same phlegmatic responses to economic hardship from the Suzi Petkovskis of this world. The same clamped, chain-smoking capacity for endurance, the same grim shrug, as if politics were some kind of massive, capricious weather system you couldn’t do anything about. I went back to watching the skyline.

the truth was far more complex, and ultimately far more scary. But who in this universe wants the truth?

It’ll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that’s always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can’t get by on past models, you have to keep moving forward, building better minds and bodies. Either that or the universe moves in like a swamp panther and eats you alive.

Yukio was angry because he was. Because he was an asshole male with delusions of status just like Dad, just like the rest of them, and I’d humiliated him in front of Plex and Tanaseda. Because he was an asshole male just like the rest of them, in fact, and rage was the default setting.

You’d think they’d develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You’d think they wouldn’t fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn’t deploy weaponry that would render the theater of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come.

You’d think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar system with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate.

Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicolored idiot tide it was.

He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.’ ‘Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he’s unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.’ She flinched. ‘You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—’ ‘Four.’ I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. ‘I’m talking about four isolated incidents. And that’s just this year.

A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimetres apart for what seemed like minutes before the realisation of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth.

You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That’s comforting, isn’t it.

We live in hope, Or make it ourselves.