Best 253 quotes in «cyberpunk quotes» category

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.

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.

Gene replacement therapy--they tell me it really hurts. It always hurts... It all hurts. Everything hurts. For as long as you can still feel it.

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.

Funny how late is always too late.

He got one finger cut off when he was young... The cafe paid for a replacement, put some nano-plastic in there. The kid got hooked. It happens. You get some plastic in you, you just want some more...Some more of that strength. Because that's what it is. Strength. The Strength to persist.

...glimpses through the clouds of numerous and enormous Second Free Zone residential arks and barges lumbering through their selective tracks like a slow-motion game of hide and seek played by listless, blunt whales.

Glittering news chips in men’s sideburns and women with braided microfilament glo-strands stepping around me, laughing with silver lipsticks. Kaleidoscope streets: lights and traffic and dust and coal diesel exhaust. Muddy and wet.

Guilt keeps on coming today, and never feels any less awful. The thought hadn't even occured to try to see himself for her viewpoint. And it's no excuse for him to say he only knew she had one this morning. Here he is, apparently wanting to protect her, and he hasn't even paid her the common courtesy of trying to know her beyond the abstract concept...and all because she comes with a different personal pronoun.

Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that's out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don't have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.

...Heard the rushing wind, saw through his tears: red and blue flaring light, and then he shut up and looked for it but found nothing.

He kissed the tip of my finger, and I smiled at this. I would not be able to heal him, but he would not hate me for failing. That would be enough for both of us.

Her teeth clattered together like banging cymbals. Her fingernails glowed white, and her heart stuttered over two beats. “Input. It. Now.” “Done!” Let go, Nika. All you have to do is let go. She focused on her fingers, which seemed to be glued to the conduit, and directed every conscious process to willing them apart millimeter by— —she flew backward across the room and slammed into what remained of a wall.

He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over, it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y- chromosomes.

her searches told her all mothers felt this way, at one time or another. There always came a day—no matter how hard one tried, no matter how tightly one locked the door and barred the windows—when the outside world would come creeping in. When your baby’s head would turn away from the glowing hearth of home and toward the glitter of false promises.

Her coral liptint was faintly luminous; when she pressed her lips together, they made a glowing rosebud in her face.

He studied his face through her eyes, the image echoing between them, and then she watched as words coalesced—language like foam forming on black seas of thought…

How many rough blows had she suffered? How many times had she been an unwilling step for the selfish souls of her fellow opposite gender? And the Pinkies, so white and so male, were like living stiff boots of conquerors.

He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.

How can it be hard and easy at the same time?” asked Omar. “It's like a really tall wall,” said Anja. “It might be hard to climb, but there's no flying crocodiles to fight off while you do it.

How convenient, lust and a career move in the same packet.

I blinked, and the world exploded with data. Images, scanned documents and photographs, a whirlwind of numbers, under-the-table deals, and whispered words.

...humans are fallible. Fallible for putting all their trust into the network. Fallible for not believing what they see with their own eyes. And we at Aventine use that to our advantage.

I admit you’ve all proved me wrong, thus far. But remember, at the time we were barely two centuries away from the SAI Rebellion, and the bloodbath we fled still burned bitterly in our souls. “The Anadens? They were not a peaceful people. Oh, they loved to climb up on their pillars and proclaim their evolutionary superiority. But when you got down to it, they took what they wanted, by force if necessary. They crushed dissent when it became inconvenient, as we learned the hard way. They were bullies and tyrants, and they were us.

Hybridization, he figures, is destined to become one of the ways this generation out-rebels the last generation. How we went from long-haired hippie freaks to pierced punk rockers to transsexual teenagers taking hormones.

I am a more modern female vampire since I came just when our world was disappearing due to the intromission of this future.-Enyo

I can’t,’ I say. Her mind closes like a shutter, with finality. I wish, at that moment, that I had said something else.

Ideas are ephemeral. Easily lost. And his was lost to him long before he realized it. All he's left with is this feeling, a hallowing combination of humiliation and profound shame over time lost, life wasted and potential squandered. But, as always, there's no way to articulate any of this to anyone. Not even to her. So he keeps walking.

... ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they're in as genes are in the bodies they're in: just enough to get themselves copied...Like computer viruses.

I'd caught what cameras call an updraft: just as the viewers got over the first rush of interest, others smelled the excitement and tuned in. The surprise of the newcomers strengthened the scent, attracting still more people, in a spiral that could make the feedback escalate out of control. Wave upon wave of astonishment crashed through me. I tried to look down, but the curiosity of millions forced my head back up. I stood there staring at the whale like someone forced to look into the sun, unable to turn away, though my mind cringed from the sight and my eyes were burning. It was not just an updraft, but riptide: feedback so strong that it flooded out my own emotions and derailed my thoughts. The audience grew so large and so greedy that it wouldn't even let me blink.

I’d been an outcast my entire life. Growing up with technophobe parents in the dawn of a Cyborg Age did that to a person.

I don't trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff on the sand when the tides of experience recedes. As long as they're part of that process, there's something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.