## Metadata - Author: [[Charles Stross]] - Full Title: Neptune's Brood - Category: #books ## Highlights - adrift in the soupy-puddle dreams of a metamorphosing instar, ([Location 939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AR2RZ4K&location=939)) - I’d been working toward this presentation for months. Declining good-natured invitations to orgies from the crew because I had pivot tables to analyze. ([Location 1953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AR2RZ4K&location=1953)) - Money. An instrument invented in ancient temple complexes, to keep track of debt: counters that acquired mobility and went a-walking, weaving webs of debt into vast and intricate meshes, enslaving and directing the labor of billions in service of the obligations created by its issuance. Latterly, slow money: a framework invented to systematize the repayment of debt across interstellar distances, to provide for stable exchange of labor by light-speed transmission. Money: a shadow play projected on the walls of our minds by the dark sun of debt. In picking up my part of the Atlantis Carnet, I had laid claim to the repayment of a debt serviced by millions of now-dead people; people presumably killed by my lineage mater and her coconspirators. I found myself looking at it from outside, with newly opened eyes. What I saw looked uncommonly like a different kind of fraudulent vehicle: a Ponzi scheme sprayed across the cosmos, the victims entire solar systems, the pyramid spreading on a wave of starships. ([Location 4021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AR2RZ4K&location=4021)) - Rumor is the only information channel that travels faster than light. ([Location 4062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AR2RZ4K&location=4062))