Oceanic. The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again. In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, “Do you believe in God?” My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didn’t reply straight away.
I’d never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a cloud of disturbed insects. “Martin?” “I’m awake.” “Do you believe in God?” “Of course.” Our family had always been Transitional, but Daniel was fifteen, old enough to choose for himself. Daniel said, “Why?” I heard Daniel shift slightly. I laughed. Daniel said, “What makes you so sure that there were ever really Angels? Permutation City excerpt. Paul Durham opened his eyes, blinking at the room’s unexpected brightness, then lazily reached out to place one hand in a patch of sunlight at the edge of the bed. Dust motes drifted across the shaft of light which slanted down from a gap between the curtains, each speck appearing for all the world to be conjured into, and out of, existence — evoking a childhood memory of the last time he’d found this illusion so compelling, so hypnotic: He stood in the kitchen doorway, afternoon light slicing the room; dust, flour, and steam swirling in the plane of bright air.
For one sleep-addled moment, still trying to wake, to collect himself, to order his life, it seemed to make as much sense to place these two fragments side-by-side — watching sunlit dust motes, forty years apart — as it did to follow the ordinary flow of time from one instant to the next. Then he woke a little more, and the confusion passed. Then he began to remember the details of his preparations. And this one? Enough. Paul No? Glory. Greg Egan's Home Page. Works Online. Oracle. On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed. He’d woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions he’d discovered in his first few days — the least-worst solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement — had been able to dull his sense of panic.
He’d been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation. That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways to minimise his discomfort, sometimes he couldn’t, but he’d been clinging to the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt him. Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. Towards the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. Singleton. I was walking north along George Street towards Town Hall railway station, pondering the ways I might solve the tricky third question of my linear algebra assignment, when I encountered a small crowd blocking the footpath.
I didn’t give much thought to the reason they were standing there; I’d just passed a busy restaurant, and I often saw groups of people gathered outside. But once I’d started to make my way around them, moving into an alley rather than stepping out into the traffic, it became apparent that they were not just diners from a farewell lunch for a retiring colleague, putting off their return to the office for as long as possible.
I could see for myself exactly what was holding their attention. Twenty metres down the alley, a man was lying on his back on the ground, shielding his bloodied face with his hands, while two men stood over him, relentlessly swinging narrow sticks of some kind. I turned to the other spectators. “Has anyone called the police?” “Fuck it.” “Yeah. The Plank Dive. Gisela was contemplating the advantages of being crushed — almost certainly to death, albeit as slowly as possible — when the messenger appeared in her homescape. She noted its presence but instructed it to wait, a sleek golden courier with winged sandals stretching out a hand impatiently, frozen in mid-stride twenty delta away.
The scape was currently an expanse of yellow dunes beneath a pale blue sky, neither too stark nor too distracting. Gisela, reclining on the cool sand, was intent on a giant, scruffy triangle hovering at an incline over the dunes, each edge resembling a loose bundle of straw. The triangle was a collection of Feynman diagrams, showing just a few of the many ways a particle could move between three events in spacetime. In “empty” spacetime, interactions with virtual particles caused each component’s phase to rotate constantly, like the hand of a clock. In the presence of matter, all the same processes became slightly skewed.
The messenger caught her eye again. Riding the Crocodile. This story is set in the same universe as the novel Incandescence, some 300,000 years before Rakesh’s journey to the bulge. It is not a part of the novel itself.Copyright © Greg Egan, 2005. All rights reserved. In their ten-thousand, three hundred and ninth year of marriage, Leila and Jasim began contemplating death. They had known love, raised children, and witnessed the flourishing generations of their offspring. They had travelled to a dozen worlds and lived among a thousand cultures. Before dying, though, they wanted to attempt something grand and audacious. Choosing the project was not a great burden; that task required nothing but patience. “No. “Not yet.” Sometimes Leila would dream that she’d found it in her dreams, but the transcripts proved otherwise. Years passed. One night, Leila stood alone in the garden, watching the sky.
A destination? The stars tingled with self-aggrandisement, plaintively tugging at her attention. “We go where?” “As close to the Aloof as we’re able.” Steve Fever. A few weeks after his 14th birthday, with the soybean harvest fast approaching, Lincoln began having vivid dreams of leaving the farm and heading for the city.
Night after night, he pictured himself gathering supplies, trudging down to the highway, and hitching his way to Atlanta. There were problems with the way things got done in the dream, though, and each night in his sleep he struggled to resolve them. The larder would be locked, of course, so he dreamed up a side plot about collecting a stash of suitable tools for breaking in. There were sensors all along the farm’s perimeter, so he dreamed about different ways of avoiding or disabling them. Even when he had a scenario that seemed to make sense, daylight revealed further flaws.
When the harvest began, Lincoln contrived to get a large stone caught in the combine, and then volunteered to repair the damage. “Yeah.” Lincoln waited for a moonless night. He put on his boots and headed for the irrigation ditch. Orphanogenesis (excerpt) This is an excerpt from the novel Diaspora by Greg Egan, first published in the United Kingdom by Orion/Millennium and in the United States of America by HarperCollins. Copyright © Greg Egan, 1997. All rights reserved. Konishi polis, Earth 15 May 2975, 11:03:17.154 UT The conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself.
In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields: short segments, six bits long, each containing a simple instruction code. The conceptory’s accumulated knowledge of its craft took the form of a collection of annotated maps of the Konishi mind seed. Where it was known that only one code could lead to successful psychogenesis, every route on the map converged on a lone island or a narrow isthmus, ochre against ocean blue. Elsewhere, the map recorded a spread of possibilities: a broad landmass, or a scattered archipelago.