Best 253 quotes in «cyberpunk quotes» category

A group of giant insectoid creatures floated to the area near the stage. One of them spoke in a series of clicks that the language master knew instantly. "Play hard and fast hairless monkeys!" Greeg shouted, "We're Transmitted Infections from the inner-worlds and this is punk fucking rock!" Crash hit a crunching , distorted guitar note. the Slugs spit in happiness at the sound of the guitar. Greeg liked a species with a love for badass music. He was sure this would be a great show.

Alex thrust her hand and half her arm into the labyrinth of light. Her stare blanked, and in the halo of the matrix her eyes and glyphs blazed so radiantly she looked as if she were being consumed by a primordial fire. “She just stuck her hand into Machim Command’s central server matrix!” Caleb smiled, watching on in blatant awe. “She does that.

Alice in Wonderland, Alice down the rabbit hole, Alice out in Cyberspace, flung along the lines of data, flying across fields of light, the night cities that live only behind her eyes.

America has fallen and I don't feel so good myself.

And so Ikne walked away from his idyll and got a job sharpshooting for the Perambuco guerrillas in Salvador. It wasn't an easy life, and one day he got shot in the stomach by a lead bullet. The bullet fell in love with him, of course, but she couldn't stop the slow bleed of his gastric cavity into his pancreas, and she felt terrible, which was too bad, since he'd known all along what would happen. He died; he always said he would. Someone had to take out the bullet.

And this is the end of Elaine Stainless, it seems. I thought I was helping those I’d harmed before, somehow—that I was making amends. I still think that now, if I’m honest. It’s not like there’s anything else I can do. Your backstory always gets you in the end.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

Any children born within the city are squeezed out with the standard nano package. It’s programmed in, parent to kid. First thing they do is carve a Security Identification Number into the fetal brain, upload that data to the system.

As he walked...he picked up the holodreams of the suits... _I believe_. A yellow-suited man was flying one World War II plane and fighting another. He had his arms out and banked and turned like he was actually flying. Tommy sniggered. Everything was nostalgia, dull, plebian, safe and nothing, nothing in all this magical world was the least bit new or upsetting.

Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.

A shout from the other side of the hole echoed through the destroyed room. “Hello? Are there injured up here?” Nika smiled. “Sounds like a response team is already here.” “Oh, thank gods.” Maggie slouched against the wall. “You know, waking up out of the blue and being told you’d died weeks earlier, your home’s been destroyed, the government’s been overthrown and a horrible alien species is on their way here to make your death permanent? It’s not as easy to recover from as it sounds.” Nika reached out and hugged her. “I know it’s not. But we are going to survive this. I promise you.

...as my fist drove through her ribs. Bone cracked. Shifted. The numbers in my optics hit steel-bending digits and Muerte lost her footing. My meat flagged, but the arm Orchard had fixed up and the shoulder girdle she’d strengthened didn’t.

A washing machine repairman dying of laryngeal cancer had only one recurring thought: There is no excuse for making an angel cry.

Balot was gripped by the Doctor's words, not even nodding now. Choice--right. She felt the two words spinning around like hands on a clock, then snapping into position together. A magic moment. Magic that would transport Balot to a different place. In the interior workings of choice and right a number of complicated cogs spun together. The doctor was one of those cogs.

Becoming real simply because he'd appeared on a few thousand TV screens. Growing up with a sense that media events were real, and personal events were not. Anything that didn't happen on television didn't happen. Even as he hated conventional programming, even as he regarded it as the cud of ruminants, still it defined his sense of personal unreality; and left him unfinished.

As each story for Cyber World popped up in my inbox, my confusion about how I defined cyberpunk grew. And I loved that feeling. Left to define the term “Cyber World” as they saw fit (or gloriously unfit), the authors formed a vast unconscious collective that redefined cyber-something-or-other for the current millennium. A network, you might even say. I don’t say that flippantly. Cyberpunk—or should we just start saying “cyberfiction”?—must must continually plug back into itself, challenge itself, consume itself, and reinvent itself if it hopes to survive and remain relevant.

Below her lay the deserted ant farm city. A skyscraper was her only shadow. Plasma gas globes and lava lamps gleaned. Ded Tek was a city of hot lavenders, ketchup reds and taffy yellows. It was all wrong, the color and the acidic rain and the grinding morning cold.

Below her are the lights of the valley, like burning jewels on a dark tide. The Bay is a negative space around them, its leaden ripples picked out in the moonlight. There is, Irina realizes, a pattern in the flawed latticework of lights, something deeper than the incidental geometry of buildings and streetlight, to which the city has, unwitting, conformed itself, and, with this revelation, what she had taken for single lights expand into constellations, and each of their lights is a constellation in itself, luminescent forms in an endless descent, and the city is like a nebula, radiant with meaning, and this is how she finally knows she’s dreaming.

But that was then, and then is a world away from now.

Buckminster Fuller said don’t try to change human behavior. It’s s a waste of time. Evolution doesn’t mess around; the patterns are too deep. Fuller said go after the tools. Better tools lead to better people. Arctic doesn’t develop products. We may cultivate them, occasionally, in our own particular way, but our business is change. Significant change.

Children are turning themselves into monsters and, quite frankly, it is your fault. You initiated the creation of this technology, then you allowed it to slip through your fingers.” Miriam’s jaw tightened. “I disagree, but now is the least optimal time imaginable for assigning blame. People are dying, and I will not stand around debating semantics with you while they are.

Connecting to the outernet was less of a shock this time, as the monitor gave him a sense of distance from it, but it was still annoying. How did these people live with such a system, stalked by advertisements and "free" offers and icons that would take you to another site, unasked-for, the moment you gave them your attention? It was like wending your way through an obstacle course. Perhaps after a while you just learned to tune it all out... or perhaps you could buy programs that did it for you. He would have to design himself one of those before he did any more real work on the outernet, though he suspected that the consumer programs which were stalking him were capable of adapting to anything he could turn out quickly. Advertising: the ultimate predator. He longed for the simplicity of the Gueran network, which simply did what it was supposed to and no more. When had these people lost touch with the fact that the purpose of a network was to facilitate communication, not impede it?

Can you look at this brilliant wound?

Dashiel’s jacket slid off his shoulders to land on the floor as he headed straight to the kitchen, fumbled in the cabinet for a glass and poured sake into it until the liquid spilt over the brim onto the counter. His hand shook as he picked up the glass, spilling more of the sake to trickle between his knuckles as he brought it to his lips. A single droplet sloshed onto his tongue. The sweet nectar of oblivion. The harbinger of a fog rolling in to sweep away the pain in favor of blissful stupor— —he hurled the glass across the room. It shattered on impact with the far sturdier window glass, and a hundred tiny shards joined the sake in decorating the floor.

...destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

Bodybreaking, they called it. What happened when the breaks finally killed you. The moment your mind's hold on the here and now finally ruptured forever and you broke free from your body.

Do AIS dream in electric sleep? He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.

Directional acoustics. In a place that sells sounds, they’re a must.

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.

Do not talk about the past here. Do not ask your neighbor why they left wherever they are from; do not expect your newfound friends to wax nostalgic for homes that no longer exist. Perhaps the past holds more than merely pain for you, but you can't assume that this is true for anyone else. We want to smell it, taste it, hear its songs, feel its desert heat or summer rain, but we do not want to talk about it. The things we've been through cannot hurt us here, unless we let them. The Fallen cities, the nations drowned in blood. The cries of our loves ones. Those stories we lock away. We will need new ones.

Don’t you talk to me about debt. You think you know what debt is? Debt is an abusive husband. Everyone says ‘why don't you just leave him, why don’t you be strong’ but you can’t. He’ll follow you and make it worse. He shows up at your work drunk and angry. He calls your family in the middle of the night and tells them lies about you. He’s in your finances. He’s got your passwords. He threatens your friends to find out where you are. Until you’re up four nights straight trying to build up the strength to check your email, I don’t want to hear another word out of your fucking mouth about debt.

Do you know what an Asterion is?” “Do you?” Nika caught herself before she flinched, frowned, gasped or gave any other outward sign of surprise, but it was definitely not the response she’d anticipated. “Explain your answer.” “If you were capable of comprehending my explanation, my answer would no longer be needed. I will instead give you the answer you were expecting: Asterions are a species of hybrid synthetic-organic beings of moderate sapience who practice self-directed evolution.” Moderate sapience? She bit back a tart retort; a diplomat never got offended or angry unless they intended to do so.

Do you remember, Abelard... Once I told you that ecstasy was better than being God." "I remember." "I was wrong, darling. Being God is better.

Dry ash and waxy lust. Language was caked to the roof of his mouth. He snorted in derision. To his left Mickey-san, in brilliant tasai coloration, greeted another artificial lemon-yellow day and asian-blue 'skies'. The protective corneal bubble over the area glowed softly with artificial lightning. He adjusted his goggles to see through the brown air. Tiny insects roped across the bubble's exterior.

Ebun becomes completely conceptual in the xenosphere. She is an idea from infancy, the non-verbal stage. There are no words with which to understand her form, and there is no image. We are aware of her presence, but it is extremely abstract. The idea is her own, from her own early life. Even she does not fully understand it, but she can pull it out of lost memories and use it. She is safe. It is an elegant solution which I wish I had thought of.

Everywhere they touched, my skin responded. It sent signals to the receiver, to the synth, to the amp, and the sounds were broadcast over the PA. I’d set it to translate this first song into a single key, so the notes built into chords, then broke apart. I had ways to distort, to sustain, to make a note tremble as if it were bowed. It was me: I was playing me; they were playing me. I was the instrument, the conduit, the transmutation of loss into elegy, song into prayer, my own prayers into notes, notes into song. Body and music, fingers and hands, they drew me out.

Fads swept the youth of the sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

Far be it from me to examine the motives of such a consistent patron of the applied arts. After all, the very rich aren’t like you and me.

First the bugs divide your mind into parcels that are almost independent--I always picture paper growing up between the wrinkles of the brain like the membrane between cloves of garlic. The ants descend on each clove in turn, carry it off to grayspace, and reconnect it. As this happens, you briefly lose certain capacities, sight, mostly--I was blind for a time, and when the sight came back I was agnosic, and then paralyzed.

Five-Year,” a term given to cash minted before 2023. That was the last year cash was produced without embedded chips that could trace every use of the currency as if it was a debit or credit card.

Flirting has to be the original form of guerrilla marketing, from back before markets even existed.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

Encrypted digital watermarking,” explains Balthazar. “Information gets hidden in information, like a code inside the pixels. Only visible with the right kind of key. It’s called steganography. Here,” pointing at the cylinder, “they’re using a similar technique, but done at the nano-level, with DNA as the information carrier. GFP is green fluorescent protein, in this case jellyfish genes woven into the atoms of the metal. The heat from your hand is the key.

...even the Gujarat-bot dreams of electric sheep.

For a strained moment, I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t hear anything but the shattered pulse of a hammered artery struggling to keep up; fury carved in stinging wasps.

Feel no regret for roses, autumn too has its delights...How could she say that? Didn't she see that for us there could never be autumn, that we could never sit, as anyone else could sit, beside the fire all day on Sundays in November; that September's leaves, that fall for man and beast alike, were not our leaves to walk in; that October storms would never find us sharing an umbrella? The love of spring had thrived on wine and candles; now in the August of our lives, we needed newspapers and comfortable chairs. But it was impossible. No autumn--only a cold wind that blew through our summer, freezing the leaves in their places before they could motley and fall.

For Amiga, family has always been part of the problem. Growing up in poverty, in that matriarchal tornado of an indifferent mother and bitter aunts and slamming against immovable walls of her father's disappointment, she learnt to disappear. When Machiko died it was the only way she could cope.

Freedom. The freedom to be, without limits, to the very best of your ability. The freedom to move without fear or reticence and live your life one leap at a time. The freedom to unbind yourself from all those paths that have been constructed for you by society and find your own way through the obstacles. The freedom to write your own physics, accepting nobody’s rules of gravity and space but your own.

From up here, the city below looked calm. Peaceful. Serene. It was a lie. Mia could feel the lie in her bones, in the foreboding creeping along the fine hairs on her skin. But mostly she could feel it in her head, where preparations were underway across Romane to meet the coming chaos.

Funny how they’re corpses if you didn’t know them, but bodies if you did.