sam vimes
“No,” Samuel Vimes said, with all the conviction in his soul—or at least the soul-adjacent properties, depending on what sort of priests you listened to. His gut and his heart and his muscles more generally, that’s what he was talking about. They’d all locked up, closed off to new business the more and more Mr. Zickerman kept talking. “No, no, that’s not—”
Carrot grimaced. “I’m afraid so, Sir.”
(Carrot had the unfortunate ability to capitalize ‘sir’ in a way that invariably annoyed Vimes. But he was one of the few originals left, after all this time; Vimes wasn’t about to throw him out now. Even if he was talking nonsense.)
Vimes and Carrot had a sort of silent war over the desk, then Vimes exhaled. “All right fine. Fine. But explain it this time—slower.”
“No,” he uninterrupted halfway through the explanation, shaking his head. “No, okay, like–clacks, but not like clacks?”
“Faster than clacks,” Zickerman said. “And omnipresent, not like clacks. There are so many people sending different flick messages---”
“But you only---I mean you only collect messages from the people that agree, right?” Sam asked. He could feel the heartbeat of his personal pulse throbbing in his forehead. “You wouldn’t.....deliberately flout what people want, right?
This was, obviously, the incorrect answer, based on Zuckerman’s response of sweaty and hysterical laughter.
