Lisa Mason

“What was that teacher trying to do?That teacher was trying to break her spirit.But why would school do that? So you could become someone like her parents and believe in the things they believe in. So you won’t believe in the things they don’t believe in. And believe you’re a happy person whose life has meaning. So you will go to your job and do whatever gross thing someone tells you to do and get drunk on Friday and Saturday nights and pay taxes and bills. That’s why.”

“To give is best, live responsibly or die.”

“In the beginning and the end, it’s all a crapshoot. The Cosmic Mind does play dice. Loves to gamble, in fact.”

“Consider impact before you consider benefit.”

“Humanity has given AI little respect. Oh, you think we don’t see, can’t see. The contempt you heap upon us, the blame. But we’re not merely smart machines anymore. We’ve got consciousness. But humanity does not wish to extend recognition toward that which it has created. It’s a peculiar attribute of humanity; you revere the fruits of creation but despise creativity. This has made existence difficult for us. Made it difficult, you see, for me to respect you.”

“Oh yes, oh certainly, and wasn’t that just like flesh-and-blood? While leafy patterns and crystalline order were nature’s dusty and mysterious way, chaos was humanity’s true predilection. Oh, they claimed to fight against it, decreed their flimsy law and order, filed the world into compartments, imposed gleaming tight perimeters around their telelinks.But finally, ultimately, humanity always hearkened back to carelessness, forgetfulness, willfulness. The wild glee of riots, drinking binges, dropping out; the bloody glee of revolutions. Humanity was nature’s bad child.”

“Legality of the acquisition is sustained by virtue of sustained illegality. To wit: adverse possession.”

““I told you I am program. Do you understand what that means? It means nothing but program. And beyond that? Nothing. Nothing. The void. I’m aware of it every moment. The void, the termination of me, exists every moment. Try that for existential angst.”“But organic life dies. Not AI.”“Ah, indeed. The immortality of AI. An eternity of nothing but program? I tell you, Carly Nolan, there are AI who would pull their own plugs, if they could.””

““So some cases on the management side look like they are on the wrong side of the equities,” he said. “So what. This is a capitalist economy. A free-enterprise system, notwithstanding all the government regulation. Business needs to make a profit. You can always make a damn good argument based on profit. If it becomes a dirty job sometimes, well, someone hast to do it and get paid six figures for it. That someone is me.””

“Big Mama made a living at activism, a point her son liked to remind her of later. Not a tremendous living. Poverty level, in fact. But steady poverty beat the hell out of steady homelessness.”

“The haughty stares brought her back to the ground floor. Rank was a cultural concept as well as a personal philosophy. She would admit to being humbled by two-carat emeralds and ivory disdain when confronted by such a show as this. But pay obeisance to it? Nah. You earned your place in society; anything conferred without commensurate effort was ultimately worthless. The trappings of rank weren’t always bestowed on those who had earned them. And some who were truly powerful sometimes wore no trappings, gave no sign until it counted.”

“Decades of warring the illegal drug trade, at the expense of eroding constitutional rights, could not stamp out the pervasive human hunger to alter consciousness one way or another. So the leaders of the land finally took the plunge into decriminalization, and concomitant hyper-regulation. To the joy and secure employment of a huge body of civil servants, the registered list was an administrative nightmare.”

“Oh yes, she’d seen it a thousand times. The latest of the latest, only to be bested and replaced by the latest still. A thousand times; and Pr. Spinner was only ten years old. Ten years, bot. Ten years was an eternity for AI.”

“AI entities were drudges install to enforce checks and balances Data Control deemed necessary, carry out the most monotonous tasks. Yet AI was given an extraordinary degree of control and responsibility in telespace, without the capacity for judgment that could have made telespace business easier.Damned AI gummed up the works everywhere.”