“Is he dead?” Irravel asked. “Depends what you mean by dead.” — Alastair Reynolds

“All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?”

“I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.”

“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.