Oblivion: Stories

The fliptop stenographer’s notebook was partly for effect, but it was also what Skip Atwater had gotten in the habit of using out in the field for background at the start of his career, and its personal semiotics and mojo were profound; he was comfortable with it. He was, as a matter of professional persona, old school and low tech.

(the fellow could not understand or reproduce the airline passenger’s pronunciation of the dominant village’s name, which evidently consisted mostly of glottal clicks and pops)

It was not a soporific conceit. It was also, obviously, private.

there were several moments of dead silence as everyone’s individual neocortices worked to process the visual information and to scan their memories for any thing or combination of live or animated things the figure might resemble or suggest.

And yet the lone moment of The Exorcist that has stayed so emphatically with me over the years consisted only of a few frames, and had precisely this rapid, peripheral quality, and has obtruded at odd moments into my mind’s eye ever since.

Brint Moltke sat hunched or slumped with his toes in and his hands in his lap, a posture reminiscent of a scolded child, but at the same time smiling at Atwater. As in smiling the entire time. It was not an empty professional corporate smile, but the soul effects were similar.

Her hair was wiglike in overall configuration, but it had a high protein luster no real wig could ever duplicate.

so in reality Team Δy’s function was not to provide information or even a statistical approximation of information but rather its entropic converse, a cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to proceed with an OCC which in the present case the Mister Squishy Com

‘Probably only up to a certain point,’ Terry Schmidt said then in response to a sort of confirmational question from the tall man with the kite-shaped face and a partly torn tag (two of the room’s six cursive nametags were ripped or sectional, the result of accidents during their removal from the adhesive backing) that read FORREST, a 40ish fellow