Culture Commentary and Miscellaneous Musings
Each day, Marjana seemed more newly mature, a seedling thriving after the rain. It brought me a sort of wistful pride. How swiftly our children grown up, youthful aspects melting away before we blink.
Chapter 6
The sight of her in the golden morning sun is something straight out of a painting. I’m no artist, but even I feel the urge to capture this moment, if only to bottle up the calming warmth that fills my belly.
Chapter 7: Never Wake A Girl Up At An Ungodly Hour
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
“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.
page 14, Marie Quinn
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.”