We don’t know how it happened… but someone has surgically removed his lungs.
So, I’m supposed to tell you how I became a brain in a box.
Huh. Well, that starts off a little dark, doesn’t it.
Also, I don’t really know, technically, how they did it to me. It’s not like once I woke up as a disembodied brain they showed me an informational video about how they did it, just in case I was curious. Here’s the part where we snipped off all the blood vessels and peripheral nerves, the video would say. Here’s how we removed the skull and spinal column, and here’s how we stuffed your brain full of nifty little sensors to track your thoughts. Pay attention, there’s a test later.
“That’s not how I remember it, Commander.”
“Who’s telling this story, Sergeant?”
"Oooh! I know this one! “A Mind Control test-subject who hasn’t yet had his head re-examined!”
“Memories, even bittersweet ones, are better than nothing.”
Sorry, Quaid. Your whole life is just a dream.
I wanna sleep. Again. I-I-I’ve been having these dreams. They’re very frightening to me, and… I want 'em to stop. They have to stop, Dr. Crane. They have to.
You don’t speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.
So, there it was. Spread out before her, wide open—dreams greater than any girl from Ndebele could have even imagined. Nor did Thandi doubt for a moment that Rozsak was being perfectly sincere. This was no ploy. This was for real.
“No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.”
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.
“so many thoughts, my kvothe. you know too much to be happy.”
But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.
A colder, more savage ache went through her, and she embraced it. She built it into her armor, raising the icy walls higher and thicker to hold the pain at bay just a little longer. Just long enough to do the last thing that would ever matter to her again.
Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.
“Just follow me and run like your life depends on it. Because it does.”
Basically…run.
You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.
It’s the adrenaline, the thrill of the chase. I love this game. And I’m very good at it.
Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming