Keith > Recent Status Updates

Halfway mark, it’s a slow march but so fascinating.

I wondered what, if anything, of her demeanor wasn’t a conscious performance. It was perhaps the most frightening thing I ever saw her do; it was as if her mastery of espionage made her a kind of animate mask, as if human speech were no more than insect chirps or birdcalls to be mimicked.

The ugliness rose like smoke in the room, spreading to its far corners, fouling the light at the window. The ugliness entered the woman and stained her eyes. Her lips moved, trying to find the words that would exorcise it.

“Blood and starlight, what made you think this was a good idea.”

She considered for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designers.

And how was she to know whether an ezuazuacat was really a friend of the Emperor, or just a symbolic one? This was the problem with an entire society that obsessively re-created its own classical literature, and wouldn’t she have liked to explain that to herself two weeks ago.

“I was hoping for something bubbly and yet achingly world-weary, something diverting and yet full of lacerating and unforgettable insights about the human condition, something that was fun while being at the same time no fun at all, in a bracing sort of a way, something that cheered me up while making me want to hang myself.”