Ohms Law except voltage is synaptic twitch

A sagacious ironist or an ironic sage, I forget which, once observed that to become human does not come easily. And it is this idea of becoming human as an achievement, a thing to be worked out in time, that resonated with our protagonist as he went from project to project, downloading packets of information and accepting new targets with amoral aplomb and near-sociopathic bonhomie:

down and out in Sanyer, with a crooked but decidedly self-aware businessman to smear and then blackmail (the latter to be done by someone else). The businessman was a wholesale grain trader, but this dispute had something to do wirh oil and the sale of tractors. It was simple: he would plant illicit imagery on the mans home computer, which he was able access with rope and an actual grappling hook, and afterward, it would be discovered, security services would become involved, and whomever or whatever the man had been impeding would be free to move. When it was done he hired a boat to ferry him down the Bosporus toward Istanbul and sat down to a meal of lamb and strong yeasty beer at a little family joint in the Tarlabasi district;

down and out in Lyon, where he used a garrote to end the days of a small-time gangster who had drawn too much attention to a smuggling operation from Mexico that had been in place and more or less accepted by local authorities until the gangster tried to use the same method to start importing guns and declined to increase the total of the hush payments. It was “hogs get slaughtered, pigs live on” logic, which came with the territory. Still, the insistence on the garrote - the immediacy of it was what was emphasized - struck our man as unnecessarily baroque and risky. But he was well compensated and was permitted to come two days early to feast and consume what he could of the city. And then he shuttled back to Cologne, with at least three weeks off before he would head back out again . . . .