Right now, my judgment is suspended. I’m in no state to hold an opinion on the matter; I have a head full of received knowledge, colored by my client’s perspective, possibly even tainted with lies.
There are Hilgemann Institutes around the world, through no fault of anyone called Hilgemann; it’s widely known that International Services paid their marketing consultants a small fortune to come up with the “optimal” name for their psychiatric hospital division. (Whether public knowledge of the name’s origin spoils the optimization, or is in fact the strongest basis for it, I’m not sure.)
I have no good reason to hate this man. There are millenarians
As for the stars, they were never ours to lose; the truth is, we’ve lost nothing but the illusion of their proximity.
Foreign Affairs, Customs, and the airlines, are all being screwed blind, twenty-four hours a day, by a hundred different hackers – and, ironically, that’s what makes it possible, if you’re lucky, to trace an illegal traveler. Hackers may run rings around the target systems’ own archaic security, but they can’t avoid making their presence known to each other. In the process of capturing data essential for their own work, they can’t help capturing details of other violations in progress. Like all information, this is for sale.
The lack of a positive result rules out nothing; the X-rays in the cargo record could have been fudged, a few minutes after they were taken. Computerized information is as evanescent as the quantum vacuum, with virtual truths and falsehoods endlessly popping in and out of existence. Deceptions of any magnitude are possible, on a short enough time scale; laws only apply to data that sits still long enough to be caught out.
Yuen Ting-fu and Yuen Lo-ching are brother and sister, both mathematicians (topologists, to be more precise – although I gather even that is a crude generality),
“Chanting the atom deflections may have helped. But I suspect that just wanting the experiment to work, badly enough, was all it took. The more I wanted it, the greater the number of versions of me who’d still want it, once I was smeared – and so the total smeared Po-kwai must have ended up wanting it, too. Anything else would have been highly undemocratic.” She says this tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely. I say, “At last – a rigorous definition of seriousness of purpose: when you diverge into multiple selves, how many stick to your stated goal, and how many abandon it?”
Primed, I could do this indefinitely, without the slightest change in mood.
“Operating the mod isn’t the challenge. The challenge is learning how to think about it. You have to find a frame of mind which lets you pass through these situations, untroubled.
He doesn’t reply – but he doesn’t deny it. He just gives me that old look of deep spiritual agony.