We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortunate on. Whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals. Instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart. Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped.But villains are oversimplifications.

Slums are always a marvel; how human desperation can seem to warp the very laws of physics.

America has fallen and I don't feel so good myself.

Bodybreaking, they called it. What happened when the breaks finally killed you. The moment your mind's hold on the here and now finally ruptured forever and you broke free from your body.

Multicolored pipes vein the outside of every building in a dense varicose web: crimson chrome for heat, dark olive for potable water, mirror black for sewage. And then the bootleg ones, the off-color reds for hijacked heat, the green plastics for stolen water.

Qaanaaq was governed by a hundred thousand computer programs... but sometimes contradictory or irreconcilable mandates sparked a squabble that brought an agency's operations to a standstill until a human--or more likely--another AI intervened.

...the most myth-shrouded story of all is that of the nanobonded. A whole community of people who were either deliberately or accidentally exposed to the experimental wireless nanomachines that established one-to-one networks between individuals, and who, through years of training and imprinting, could "network" themselves to animals, forming primal emotional connections so that they could control their animals through thought alone.

Wood smells like wealth