JARED MASON GRIFFIN III, aged 35 (too late to become an interesting character like you!) Nephew of an earl-level Equity Lord (don't you envy him?) Married to that sunken bitch on his right They go on these little escapades to escape their own crippled lives. (why are you here?) Hackworth looked down and tried to read the placard on his own chest

“Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built up will be torn down; all they have

He still owned the family farm in northwestern Iowa, along with a few hundred thousand acres of adjoining land, which he was turning back into a tall-grass prairie, complete with herds of bison and real Indians who had discovered that riding around on horses hunting wild game was a better deal than pissing yourself in gutters in Minneapolis or

The reason she'd been furious was that copying out those books was such an unforgivably stupid waste of time. There was no end to what she could have learned reading the Primer for those eight hours. For that matter, the normal curriculum at Miss Matheson's Academy would have been perfectly fine as well. She was tormented by the irrationality of

Unlike Rog, Mark had a job. He worked in the New Atlantis Clave cleaning windows of the Vickys' homes. He would come home late in the afternoon all tired and dirty and take a long shower in their bathroom. Sometimes he would have Nell come into the bathroom with him and help scrub his back, because he couldn't quite reach one spot in the middle.

Please get out of there. Please run away. Get out of that chamber of horrors where you've been living, Nell, and get to an orphanage or a police station or something, and I will find you. No matter where you are, I'll find you. Miranda had it worked out already: she could compile an extra mattress, put Nell on the floor of her bedroom and Harv in

“Why are you looking into the darkness and not into the fire as we do?” Nell asked. “Because the darkness is where danger comes from,” Peter said, “and from the fire comes only illusion. When I was a little bunny running away from home, that is one of the first lessons I learned.”

people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has

Could it be that the Primer was just a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her? In the end, she knew, this was basically how all ractives worked. The idea was too alarming to consider at first, and so she circled around it cautiously, poking at it from different directions, like a