Adam Roberts - Jack Glass (2012)

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His last hours alive. But he didn't know!
None of us will know, of course. The weird grammar of death. You die, he or she dies, they die, but there is no genuine form for I. Not really. All know that, none know when.

Adam Roberts
I shouldn't be naive Diana said. Of course, realising its destructive power only makes them want it more. Of course. Even more than great wealth, power craves technologies of destruction. Good to be wealthy, but better to remain in power—and the more awe-inspiring the weaponry at your disposal, the better able you are to do that.

Adam Roberts
She thought of the multitude.
Trillions of human beings, wrappend like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better han being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precariously and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water—this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. Thery should be helped, not exploited.

Adam Roberts
That a human being had died did not distress her. Had it been somebody she knew it would have upset her; she wasn't a monster. Had it been somebody she cared about. But it was nobody she knew, and it would have been disingenuous to pretend that the death of somebody she didn't know affected her on an emotional level.

Adam Roberts
Diana got that seventh-sense intimation that she had touched on an unmentionable matter; although a strangely involuted one whereby the fact that it was unmentionable was itself unmentionable.

Adam Roberts
But once we are free... once we have evolved beyond the old medieval power structures and the medieval internecine violence they create, then we'll be able to use the technology responsibly. Everything depends on that.

Adam Roberts
Nobody can overthrow the fascist dictator by being nicer than him. The reason for this is: by definition everybody is always already nicer than the fascist dictator.

Adam Roberts
People-problems did not interest her. Data seemed to her a larger, purer, more transcendent quantity than Homo sapiensness. Human-to-human interactions were, effectively, all just politics, and politics bored her.

Adam Roberts
The motives that explained human murder bunched, historically, into three groups: material gain; personal grudge and sociopathy.

Adam Roberts
Jac considered: there were worse things that could happen than him dying. Of course, there were much better things too.

Adam Roberts
It could be any one of a dozen things. Experience has taught me that we much more often see connection where there is only random copresence. Pattern-seeking consciousness, you know. Great plains ape, you know.

Adam Roberts
It's not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy.
We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love, said her two MOHmies, as one. That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good....
If we are powerful, sang her MOHmies, we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.

Adam Roberts
It had to be one or the other. Did it have to be one or the other? Even the question as to whether it had to be one or the other had to be one or the other!

Adam Roberts
Eva is perfectly content with her academic research, said Diana. She just isn't interested in power. As I say those sentences, she added, clasping her knees to her chest, I can tell they're both wrong. Aren't they? Of course she's interested in power.
She's a human being, agreed Iago.

Adam Roberts
What's inside the box?
Doubt is there.
What's another name for doubt?
Death is another name for doubt. Death is what inflects the immortal certainty of the universe's process with uncertainty.

Adam Roberts
One of the curiosities of anger, of course, is that the more you focus it outward, firing it at the injustices of the world, the more it actually parses your own self-pity and resentment.

Adam Roberts
By all means let us consult your needs! So long as they overlap precisely with my needs, I'm sure we can accommodate them.

Adam Roberts
She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.

Adam Roberts
You're just doing that to pass the time, said Davide, dismissively.
Just to pass the time, agreed Jac. Though I suppose time will pass, in any case, regardless of what I do.

Adam Roberts
So it ends
As it begins.
Off we climb
And no one wins.

Adam Roberts
She didn't have to believe the technology existed. She only had to believe that people believed the technology existed. People, being stupid, believed all sorts of things.

Adam Roberts
Individually speaking, death is always a rupture, a violence. But taking a total view, death is the bell curve upon which the cosmos is balanced. Without it, nothing would work, everything would collapse, clogged and stagnant. Death is flow. It is the necessary lubrication of universal motion. It is, in itself, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.

Adam Roberts
Come out, Sukarno cried into the vegetation. I have a gun!
Mr. Sukarno, said Iago, without looking at him. You are, if you don't mind me saying, too fond of shouting 'I have a gun.'

Adam Roberts
Do you know what this is?
The floor, Miss?
Dust! I read about it—tiny particles of matter.

Adam Roberts