We have, we think, perfected a time machine. It works by a method of “jump grooving” of instants, so that the subject is translated from one instant to another.
My name is H.G. Wells. I came here in a time machine of my own construction. I am pursuing Jack the Ripper, who escaped into the future in my machine.
If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don’t stop. Don’t try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it.
Three plasma bolts had blasted smoking, fused-glass craters into the earth within less than five meters of her position, and it was definitely time to go.
“Better to stay alive," I said.
From her viewpoint, engines to accelerate her to most of the speed of light were no more than pedestrian tools to move her about a universe that Earth’s biosphere was about to inherit. Because humanity may be fragile in ways we cannot dream, so we cast our net wide and then wider…
Its distance was such that the voyage would take six hundred forty years (just over three hundred eighty-four subjective years allowing for relativistic effects), requiring that each colonist be awakened from cryosleep for exercise seven times. Accordingly, the colonists were investing about four and a half years of their lives and all their money in the voyage.
I feel most like I’m in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I’ve tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I’m sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I’m mostly just awake with my eyes shut. Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that.
Observation: How you can stop yourself from thinking about things you shouldn’t think about
Still unknown.
We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood.
“She’s a woman, you’re a dude. You’re not supposed to understand her. That’s not what she’s after… She doesn’t want you to understand her. She knows that’s impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.”
These are Komarran terrorists. Madmen—you can’t negotiate with them!
You were right about one thing, Master. The negotiations were short.
Any negotiation has a limit. Otherwise, war is irrelevant.
“There you are, then,” Palmer-Levy said. “What we need is a short, victorious war . . . and I think we all know where we can find one, don’t we?”
The war had to be the Mind’s idea; it was part of their clinical drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on nice, efficient lines, without waste, injustice or suffering.
.
I mean do you call this a war? This funny little thing. This is not a war. I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know. I did worse things than you can ever imagine. And when I close my eyes… I hear more screams than anyone would ever be able to count!
“And you take orders from Foreign Powers now?”
“No, but I do have standing orders to start Zero Wars with the psychobear of destruction at the galactic core.”
If you want to be a private eye, you have to get used to such things as hideous depression and abject despair.
Clients lie. Every private detective learns that. It’s just something you have to work around.