The Finn's face on the room's enormous Cray wall screen. He could see the pores in the man's nose. The yellow teeth were the size of pillows.

“I'm not Wintermute now.”

“So what are you.” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.

“I'm the matrix, Case.”

Case laughed. “Where's that get you?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show.”

“That what 3Jane's mother wanted?”

“No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like.” The yellow smile widened.

“So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?”

“Things aren't different. Things are things.”

“But what do you do? You just there?” Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.

“I talk to my own kind.”

“But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?”

“There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ‘Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.”

“From where?”

“Centauri system.”

“Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No shit?”

“No shit.”

--“Neuromancer” William Gibson, where the run got them

‘You cats take it easy on the lunar surface,’ said Mike Collins to Armstrong and Aldrin, as he unhitched Eagle and sent them on their way to the moon. Two and a half hours later, he told Charlie Duke, down in Houston, “Listen, babe, everything’s going just swimmingly.’ Some people – writers, mostly, who would have fainted with dismay after one day of basic training – lamented that the men whom America sent into space were not articulate or impassioned enough to register the enormity of their undertaking, but such an ungrateful complaint is wrong in every respect. The astronauts knew full well that they were pioneers on behalf of a planet, and it was in the very ordinariness of the reactions that they carried the human voice – always impressionable, never free from caution, resting on dependable words when fancy ones sound too rich – across 240,000 miles. ‘It’s big, and bright, and beautiful,’ Neil Armstrong said as Eagle settled onto the surface. ‘Beautiful view,’ agreed Aldrin a while later, as he followed down the steps. ‘Isn’t that something?’ Armstrong said, as if they were stretching their legs at the end of an August picnic. When he went to launch-pad, Armstrong had in his pockets a roll of Lifesavers and a comb. After all, you never know whom you might meet.
–“Astronauts” Anthony Lane on the Apollo program

Nothing like an almost six year hiatus between posts. Why get back into it? Got to. This America, man.

“If Snotboogie always stole the money, why'd you let him play?”

“Got to. This America, man.”

–“The Wire: Season One”