Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been… — Alastair Reynolds

“Only trying to make conversation, friend.”

“Don’t bother—it’s an overrated activity at the best of times.”

Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.

We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium.