“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
Screwge had endured visions without end of possible futures, containing every conceivable combination of mongrel technologies, each of which ended with his own solitary grave (or vacuum-casket or orbiting reliquary or vampire-proof holocoffin). Old Joe had haggled and gloated over his effects whether they were cotton night-clothes, wetly-glistening neuroimplants, hydraulic diesel-driven exo-armor or quaint 21st-century solid-state trinkets.
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Screwge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”
“And say,” he muttered to himself, “that they don’t all have this fucking leather-and-brass fetishist’s decor.”
