"The Lifecycle of Software Objects", ("The Summer Prince", "The Folding Knife")

[fiefoe]

In light of recent news on Aibo, Ted Chiang is ever prescient.

• Given this, some owners believe the most they can hope for is legal protection on an individual basis: by filing articles of incorporation on a specific digient, an owner can take advantage of a substantial body of case law that establishes rights for nonhuman entities.
• “I realize that,” says Chase. “And making this deal won’t prevent copies of your digients from going on to other things. But right now your digients, amazing as they are, have no marketable job skills, and you can’t predict when they’ll get any. How else are you going to raise the money you need?”  How many women have asked themselves the same question, Ana wonders. “So it’s the oldest profession.”
• At Blue Gamma they’d chosen not to put that kind of physical self-protectiveness into the digients—it didn’t make sense for their product—but what does physical intimacy mean if there aren’t those barriers to overcome?
• “When I corporation, I free make own mistakes,” says Marco. “That whole point.” Derek feels himself growing exasperated. “So do you want to be a corporation and make your own decisions, or do you want someone else to make your decisions? Which one is it?” Marco thinks about that. “Maybe I try both. One copy me become corporation, second copy me work for Binary Desire.”
• "I’ve got to hand it to you for sticking with Jax for so long. What you’ve achieved is impressive.” He makes it sound like she’s built the world’s largest toothpick sculpture.
• experience isn’t merely the best teacher, it’s the only teacher. If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
• The idea of love with no strings attached is as much a fantasy as what Binary Desire is selling. Loving someone means making sacrifices for them.

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There are many praises for Alaya Dawn Johnson's ingenious YA distopia, but I find the world building too thin and the characters too... young. The idea of a yearly kingly sacrifice has been done before. Was I ever so obsessed about reading about politics and power when I was the target age?

• The stadium is the pride of the bottom tiers — built inside one of the dozens of spherical nodes that help give our hollow pyramid city its internal structure.
• From this angle, transport pods shuttle through a glittering lattice of tubes like silver blood through luminous triangular arteries.
• “We don’t wallow in our differences the way flatlanders do.”
• "What wouldn’t I do? What wouldn’t I create? Who wouldn’t I sacrifice, if it would keep the world from ever dying again? So I take my lover, my king, and I put him on a pedestal and I cut him down. A man, like the ones who ruined the world."
• I take from the world I know: Candomblé, which always respected a woman’s power. Catholicism, which always understood the transformation of sacrifice. And Palmares, that legendary self-made city the slaves carved themselves in the jungle,
• have joked that if we hear “Eu Vim da Bahia” one more time, we might throw ourselves into the bay, but then I’m caught off guard by João Gilberto’s deceptively difficult rhythmic patterns, his gentle voice
• and I am done with fairy tales. I want art, pure and clean and uncompromising. I want Gil to be happy and I want to be happy for him. I can love Enki as the summer king without dreaming of his kisses.

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There's casual and intriguing malice in those few pages I read. Maybe I should revisit K. J. Parker later.

• She was flanked by two sentries; not physically restrained, but held in place like a chess piece that can’t move without being taken
• His mother collected medicines, rather in the way a boy collects coins or seals or arrowheads; one or two genuine pieces, along with a whole load of junk.
• If Mother was prepared to allow actual numbers at the breakfast table, things were bad.
• It goes without saying they’ll have made some tiny cock-up or other in the formalities. They always do, just in case either side needs to back out later.”
• The next, a strange creature in a white cloud fell in beside him, and he realised, with the objectivity of a historian, that nothing would ever be the same again.
• or whether it was the sheer wastefulness of coincidence.
• he knew how to be cripplingly bored without giving offence.
• Somehow he’d always assumed that love was something you didn’t really have any say in, like rules and the law and the times when meals were served. Parents loved their children,