Eventually this guy from the original team gets Death to let him bring Deep Blue to a chess match. He wins. People rage about the technocracy and preferential treatment, etcetera, but it turns out you can beat him with a MacBook running Rybka.
In fact, most of the the time all you need is one of those hand-cranked laptops, and soon deathless child armies rule the third world. They march the old warlords off to candy factories; the diamond business collapses. It’s a strange kind of paradise.
Death buys his own laptop but he can’t get the touchpad to work.
Monday, November 19, 2007
She knows everyone in the world, and these are their names:
- The Magician
- The Popess
- Strength and her friend Temperance
- Star
- Death
- The Knight
- The King
- The Queen of Swords
And herself, of course, the Page. So when she meets the man in the worn blue coat she doesn’t know what to call him.
“I’m the Emperor, my child,” he says. “Emperor Norton the First. Not Emperor here, of course, just a state visit, a diplomatic consort mission envoy. Where am I?”
“The world,” says the Page uneasily.
“Ah,” he says, “but what do you call it?”
She calls it Summersend.
Friday, September 29, 2006