False Value

The opening paragraph started A LINE MUST BE DRAWN, all in caps before settling down to three or four pages of what would have looked like deranged gibberish—to someone who hadn’t spent just over three years learning magic. With that knowledge, the writing ceased to be gibberish and became merely deranged.

As we walked back to the SCC I asked if he liked tentacle porn, and he said he could take it in small doses but he preferred his fantasies to be vaguely human.
“That’s just speciesist, that is,” I said.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Victor, as he looked with dismay at a beverage stain on his black and green Weyland-Yutani sweatshirt.
“Relax,” I said. “This is just first contact—we’re only going to exchange names and check he’s the right orientation.”
“And what do you think the right orientation is?” asked Victor.
“The one that’s facing in your direction,” I said.

Everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

The ceiling was a bog-standard suspended tile affair useful for covering up ducts, cables and xenomorph infiltrations.

She looked at me and I could see the slot machine whir of her thoughts suddenly slam to a halt with a row of three bananas.

All of this, Silver reckoned, went double for Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it.

Molly came gliding in with a silver tray and coffee service. Dressed in a viciously starched black and white Edwardian maid’s uniform, she let her straight black hair cascade down her back all the way to the waist. Pale-skinned, she had a narrow face with sharp features and black, almond-shaped eyes. She would have looked like something from Downton Abbey but only if they’d had a Halloween special directed by Guillermo del Toro.

The Folly had once had its very own school of witchcraft and wizardry—well, wizardry, because obviously women hadn’t been invented until 1945.

At the Serious Cybernetics Corporation it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going “Daisy-Daisy” and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.

Generally speaking, people were supposed to debug their own code. Everest was usually only called in if a coder was unable to fix their own work or had run screaming out of the building, never to return.

When Nightingale was training me he said that if you’re not dead in the first instance, then your chances of survival are much improved.

Magic is almost impossible to do when you’re pissed, although you can bet many have tried. So drinking with a rival practitioner can be considered, if not a peace offering, then at least a sign that you’re not planning to fight them straight away.

It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory. They run the wrong way, they refuse to move, some will run toward the danger, and others will instantly whip out their phones and take footage