Category: Media

Nupol wasn’t a language, not really. It was an argot. A cant. A cryptolect. Although it was loosely based on Inglez, the one language that most people in most berths were familiar with, its vocabulary come from everywhere. Dead Earth languages and multilingual puns. Backslang and gender reversal. Vera, after a certain point you stopped learning it and started cooking it up. It wasn’t language, it was music. Improvisation. The prattle of the disenfranchised, the palaver of the dispossessed, the lingua of the underground. And, like all underground languages, it was made to be disguised.

Chapter Two: Damietta, 23 of 25

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“There are Unknowns with antimemetic properties,” Quinn goes on. “There are ideas that cannot be spread. There are entities and phenomena that harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves.

You take a Polaroid photo of one, it’ll never develop. You write a description down with a pen on paper and hand it to someone, but what you’ve written turns out to be hieroglyphs, and nobody can understand them, not even you. You can look directly at one and it won’t even be invisible, but you’ll still perceive nothing there. Dreams you can’t hold on to and secrets you can never share, and lies, and living conspiracies. It’s a conceptual ecosystem, of ideas consuming other ideas and…sometimes…segments of reality. Sometimes, people.”

page 14, Marie Quinn

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And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing to someone?

page 46, Sybil

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Isako won’t do it. Maybe it’s vain, but she doesn’t care; she’s going to die with long hair. It’s impractical, it costs her time and money, but everyone’s got to have personal principles. Her hair is the only thing defying the pace of aging that afflicts the rest of her. It’s still thick and glossy, a black so pure that Tai used to say it was nearly blue. Tai loved her hair. He used to run his hands through it, bury his face in it, stroke it after they made love.

page 84

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