Back to: Chapter 2: Stitched Up | Forward to: Halting State: that's it

Chapter 3: Steaming

Prologue: We know where you live, we know where your dog goes to school

Chapter 1: Grand Theft Auto

Chapter 2: Stitched Up

Debug mode:

You are sitting, half-asleep, in an armchair. Your eyes are closed and you feel very unsteady. Your head's full of a post-viral haze, the cotton-wool of slowed reflexes and dulled awareness. In stark contrast to the normal state of affairs, you can hear yourself think — there's just one little voice wobbling incessantly about from side to side of your cranial prison, which is no surprise after the amount of skunk you just smoked. In the distance, the chiming clangour of tram bells sets a glorious harmony reverberating in icy splendour across the rooftops. And you are asking yourself, like the witchy-weird voice in a video of an old Laurie Anderson performance,

"What am I doing here?"

Restart:

There's a ringing in your ears. Oops, must have drifted off. That's the trouble with smoking shit to help yourselves forget —

Yourselves? Well yeah, there's you, and there's Mitch, and there's Budgie. Tom couldn't come because he was busy being newly married and responsible, but between you and Mitch and Budgie you're three of the four corners of the former Social Networking Architecture Team, and you've flown out here on a budget shuttle from Turnhouse to get falling-down legless and scientifically test all that research into whether cannabis destroys short-term memory, because god help you, it's better than remembering how badly you've been shafted.

Which is how come you're sitting in a half-collapsed armchair, stoned out of your box, on the narrow strip of flagstoned pavement alongside the Prinsengracht canal, listening to alarm bells —

Continue reading ...

3 Comments

1:

Is that the British cover on the left? So. Much. Better. Witty, even. When's it out, again?

2:

NelC: it's out in January. Sorry I had to remove it -- it was cocking up the HTML page flow. I'll reinstate it when I figure out how to do it cleanly.

3:

Yeah. I figured after my comment that the pictures were actually part of the post above. January... [sigh].

Specials

Merchandise

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on October 6, 2007 3:54 PM.

Chapter 2: Stitched Up was the previous entry in this blog.

Halting State: that's it is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Search this blog

Propaganda