The Fractal Prince (Jean le Flambeur Book 2)

If reality is not what you want it to be, change it. You should not accept anything blindly, not death, not immortality.

I don’t know why they still call it the desert, there are roads and cities and wonders, herds of von Neumann machines, dark seas of the dead, sand that listens to you and makes your dreams come true—’

‘Sometimes, it is more important to hear how a story is told than what the story is.’

‘True stories do not always end,’

Realmgates: the universal zoku interface between physical and virtual. They translate you into the language of the Realms going in, and back into physics and matter coming out. Picotech disassemblers that take the quantum information of any substance, convert it into qubits and teleport it into simulated gameworlds full of magic and dragons. Or in

Matjek asked the watson what his mother does but did not really understand the answer: quantum hedge funds and corporate avatars and doing what the shareholders vote for you to do. It sounded a bit like having imaginary friends except letting them control you, instead of the other way around.

at war, you often find yourself becoming a twin of the enemy, just as bad as the thing you fear.’