Reading William Gibson, this put me in mind of Alan Dearn.
Person in the past: [discovers an impossible secret about the future]
Person in the future: You somehow seem to simply accept all these things.
Past: You’re the one living in the future, with nanobots eating people, spare bodies, government run by kings and gangsters and shit. You accept all that, right?
Future: No. I don’t. I hate it.
And later, this:
Evil isn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.