The Fractal Prince (Jean le Flambeur Book 2)

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

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.’

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.

It has always seemed ridiculous to the warmind: to obey the dictates of what is essentially random, even if correlated with other similar states. How much better to listen to the loving voice of the metaself, echoing with the Plan.

‘True stories do not always end,’