Best 253 quotes in «cyberpunk quotes» category

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.

Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness.

Maybe that was why it was almost always the underclasses, the women, the people of color, the gay people, the ones who were already stigmatized as being vulnerable, availble, trapped by the body, who took the risk of the wire.

Maybe we should all find one,” I say. Or maybe, just for once, I should wait for someone to find me first.

Multicolored pipes vein the outside of every building in a dense varicose web: crimson chrome for heat, dark olive for potable water, mirror black for sewage. And then the bootleg ones, the off-color reds for hijacked heat, the green plastics for stolen water.

My experiment has demonstrated that people from the past can be artificially reincarnated. The purpose is so people from Twinmortal do not commit the same error that we did.-Amaranth

My feet catch the roof like the arrester hook of a fighter jet coming into an aircraft carrier.

My nerves still spark like ricocheting tracer bullets.

Mortal has not been a habitable place for a long time. We have been trying to survive patching it but one day it will break completely. Twinmortal is the future for all of us. You will achieve that future for us by learning has much as you can.

Najia can feel yts subdermal activators against her forearm. Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute. Another way of being human, speaking a phsyical language she does not understand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this body next to hers is loyal, tough, funny courageous, clever, kind, sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. All you could wish in a friend of the soul. Or a lover.

Narrow, angular features, pouty lips and hatred-filled pale, washed-out blue irises glared back at him. Caleb flashed the young man a malevolent smirk and readied his blade. “Jude Winslow, I presume.

Nel mondo dopo il Ragnarok, ognuno aveva la sua prigione, per alcuni era un'uniforme, per altri un laboratorio, per altri ancora un tugurio dove nemmeno gli scarafaggi desideravano avventurarsi.

Non c'è luogo, in questo mondo, dove lo squallore e la crudeltà fioriscano lussureggianti come per le strade di Muspel. Vi si può trovare qualsiasi cosa, viva o morta, ma spesso si tratta più di una via di mezzo tra le due, perché dove la vita si assottiglia, fino a strisciare nelle vie soffocanti ricolme di bazar, non esiste più confine tra bene e male.

My purpose is to change the fact that you’re just food. If you learn the lessons well you will be able to have a happy long life. A lot of us believe that the human being deserves the opportunity and the privilege to coexist with us. That’s why we risk ourselves and make the effort to take care of you.- Átropos

Non ha senso! Perché la vita deve fare così male? Non conoscono altro modo, quei maledetti esseri umani? Dannate creature involute e primitive, con tutte le soluzioni possibili in natura ed oltre, proprio questa?

once you start running and apply the mathematics of change, suddenly this insurmountable distance gets crushed under the curve of motion.

One of the things I like about Cyber World is that it shows cyberpunk has left its heteronormative boy’s club roots behind in the dust.

Only the framing material," Lucas demurely, "obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known in my crib, God.

Our cyberworld and cyberspace are infested with so many cyberscoundrels, cybercriminals, cybersluts and cyberpunks - that is virtually impossible for the cybercops (cyberpolice) to catch or stop them using known cybertechniques and save the cyberphobia of millions of cybernauts, many of whom are cyberholics.

Over-reliance on digital infrastructure. If you don't exist in the infrastructure, where do you exist?

Oyin Da’s mind is as elegant as a French horn, thoughts moving in whorls and evoking fresh mint leaves.

Perhaps that's what the symbol means. What's the point of anarchy when the society you live in can shove you into a box no matter how hard you rebel? He can't help but think that's why the system evolved. To contain the uncontainable. Limit the prospects of those with limitless capacity for thought, creativity and analysis.

Power rides her fingers, she moves from datashell to datashell, walking the nets like the ghost of a shadow, her trail vanishing behind her as she goes. She carries power in the dark behind her eyes.

Proximity to the device tempted him, a muted siren’s call to undress, open the coffin-like lid and climb into the lukewarm saline solution, to plug his interface jack in, sheathe his genitals in the waste catch and sink down into the glorious rush of jacking in. He missed the freefall adrenaline of consciousness translated into pure data, of his body rendered in liquid mercury, shifting and changing with his every thought. He missed the thrill of cracking databank security, of running from anti-intrusion software and other hackers.

Qaanaaq was governed by a hundred thousand computer programs... but sometimes contradictory or irreconcilable mandates sparked a squabble that brought an agency's operations to a standstill until a human--or more likely--another AI intervened.

Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What’s truer than that...

Riots followed hunger like thunder follows lightning.

My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it's easier said than done.

see, when I’m not paying attention to my barriers, I can glimpse other people’s thoughts. I catch them like lingering aftertastes or smells they leave in their wake: bitter envy, coppery anger, sour regret, the foul miasma of malice and cruelty.

Se quello era il prezzo dell'immortalità, allora sarebbe stato più alto di quello richiesto dalla morte.

She blew a light and watched a fire start. They would never leave her, now. I have no mouth, the city thought as she went to sleep, but I could kiss you.

..she can feel that burden sometimes like a wall pressing in over the dome of the false sky that bounds the city. *Someone has to*, she says again, as if the ghost is somewhere in the machines that create this Seaheaven, as if he might have cared and turns away, walks back down the vivid street, the dust soft and almost real against her feet.

She’d never been on board a ship like this one. A real starship worthy of the name, where everything from the reinforced hull to the sophisticated instrumentation created a sense of presence, of consequentiality. When a vessel of this ilk cut a swath through the void, the void noticed. But Nicolette Hinotori had once commanded a generation ship, which meant buried in Nika’s core operating system was knowledge about the operation of such vessels. She stood in the center of the bridge, closed her eyes and asked herself a question. Results flooded her mind, and she hurriedly initiated a sort-and-prioritize algorithm to impose order on them. Then she gazed around the bridge with new eyes.

She glimpsed the sexless mounds between their legs and shuddered. For some reason, she found their lack of genitals uncannily obscene, an indignity, a piece of humanity they had been denied.

She liked the high places, away from the subterranean rage of the working class. No one was there to mirror her image in their funhouse looking-glass.

She made us realize that human dignity is inalienable, and as long as there is still breath left in your body, there will always be something left to fight for.

She placed a hand on his arm. “It’s not our fault, not truly. It’s theirs. The killers. They’re the ones who—” “Get down!” Caleb collided with her back, sending her crashing to the floor hard enough to knock the air from her chest. The windows shattered and the sounds of a city overtaken by chaos rushed in.

She's always scorned his squeamishness, citing the replacement of his vagina with a dick. Joon thinks that's invasion of a far more nail-biting nature. She has no idea. It was fucking heaven. He'd do it again a million times over. And it's one hell of a long way from chopping open your head for the sake of more tech.

She's wanted to erase him from her life for the longest time and never had the courage. Now she realizes it wasn't courage she needed, but this anger. This sickening, all-consuming rage.

She tries to envision a life without the debt, but can’t string the thoughts together in the right order. The debt is all there has ever been. It makes all her decisions for her. Chooses who she is going to be.

She was everywhere. She was screaming in her tortured body. She was watching from cameras in every room. She was the false weather system and the storage devices. She was the gate keeper, throwing six shirts over her swan-brothers necks...opening six doors for her brothers to step through as young men, though their bodies were long gone, used up by the organ banks of the upper castes. A Lamentation of Swans

No one knows who made the swans, did you know that?" Massimo said this looking out over the water. Niamh felt er heart rate pick up. "Beautiful, aren't they? I wonder who did make them and why. They must have seen real swans to capture them so well don't you think?" He paused to look at Niamh as he always did. As though he still expected her to answer. Niamh raked on. "I suppose there aren't any swans left at all now," Massimo mused. No, all gone now. Gone like the lake. Gone like the farm. Gone like my brothers. Grief tore at Niamh. 'A Lamentation of Swans

Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope.” He points at the images. “This doesn’t feel like hope.

Siete stati manipolati a un livello più profondo di quanto immaginiate.

〔〔 〕〕 Shutting-down your identity requires a voyage out to K-space interzone. Zootic affectivity flatlines across a smooth cata-tension plateau and into simulated subversions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and war. You are drawn into the dripping depths of the net, where dynamic-ice security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous zones, tangled in diseased elaborations of desire.

Slums are always a marvel; how human desperation can seem to warp the very laws of physics.

Sooner or later we stop running, stop climbing, stop reaching for the sky. We stop pushing ourselves toward unattainable goals because common sense tells us that the only logical thing to do is push ourselves toward the attainable ones. If running through the world like kids on the playground is a kind of dream, then at a certain point we just stop dreaming.

standard Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, or SQUID, interface. The same kind doctors use to communicate with surgically implanted components like pacemakers.

Suddenly I could imagine all the things my body might do when I wasn't there to stop it and I felt so vile they might as well have happened. Maybe they had; they just hadn't left marks. I thought about a future full of blank spaces, and I knew I couldn't bear it. If that was the future, I had to escape it.

Tears of pain are as regular as blood and piss.