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--- normal_ellis [2017-02-17 16:27] – nik
+++ normal_ellis [2019-01-18 16:24] (current) – nik
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-==== Normal - Warren Ellis ====
+==== Normal — Warren Ellis ====
 [[reading notes]] for Normal (1-4) by Warren Ellis
+<blockquote>He was one of the generations who typed all day, and his handwriting had lost the fluency of daily practice. The note read, "You won't find me. I am returning to the cycle of nature while I still can. I don't want to see the end of the future. Tell my father I'm glad he has cancer. Goodbye."</blockquote>
+<blockquote>Inside the boundary of Normal Head Experimental Forest's thirteen thousand acres lay, over the bones of a ghost town called Normal Station, the Normal Head Research Station</blockquote>
+<blockquote>She was somewhere deep in the basement of the Uncanny Valley of faux-human speech</blockquote>
+<blockquote>"Bad case of abyss gaze," he said. "You?"</blockquote>
+<blockquote>Professional demarcation," she said. "Foresight strategists on this side. Nonprofits, charitable institutions, universities, design companies, the civil stuff. On the other side? Strategic forecasters. Global security groups, corporate think tanks, spook stuff. You know the score."</blockquote>
+<blockquote>counting off every single networked object on city street corners, like botanists identifying every single obscure poisonous plant in sight. Staring into the abyss of the future while being acutely aware of being watched by every device, every piece of street furniture and every strand of modern infrastructure.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>"It's a real question. Some of our guests come in with a serious aversion to phones. They can be like a huge symbol of everything that's weighing on them? Someone told me once that it's hard to talk when you don't know how many people are listening. Like phones are half-trained demons always ready to betray you."</blockquote>
+<blockquote>He sat there for a little while, feeling like he was waiting for his ears to pop from the change in pressure. It came to him that he didn't even know where his cell phone was. He wasn't able to tend the eight different messaging apps on it. He couldn't clear the email from either of his accounts (one open to anyone, one that was nominally private but which suffered significant bleed-through from the other). No Twitter, no Instagram, none of the public-facing services he farmed hourly. No podcasts! He was subscribed to a hundred podcasts. He winced at the gigabyte load that would be waiting for him when he retrieved his phone and reached some signal. The news apps would spin and churn away, kicking out notifications until the phone's battery was sucked dry. His quant band was gone, he noticed: he wouldn't be tracking his steps, his blood oxygen, heart rate, local EF field activity, or the five other things it automagically quantified and uploaded and shared. Digitally, he would actually appear dead. A few of his services would send updates to social media daily. The weather report in his last recorded location would post[...]</blockquote>