Alastair Reynolds

I’ll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.

“How did you…pass the time?” Sunday asked. “You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?”

“We had a different form of chinging,” Eunice said. “An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it ‘reading.’”

You’ll have to excuse our customs and immigration staff: they preach courtesy and respect while demonstrating exactly the opposite.

This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate.

The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous.

In a flash she understood herself for what she was: an exceedingly smart monkey. She was a smart monkey who had travelled across interplanetary space in a thing made by other smart monkeys. And the fact of this was enough to make her laugh out loud, as if she had suddenly, belatedly, grasped the punchline to a very involved joke.

I’m the punchline, Sunday thought. I’m the period, the full stop at the end of an immensely long and convoluted chain of happenstance and contingency stretching from the discovery of fire down in the Olduvai Gorge, through the inventions of language and paper and the wheel, through all the unremembered centuries to…this. This condition. Being brought out of hibernation aboard a spaceship orbiting another planet. Being alive in the twenty-second century. Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being.

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to be a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the whole damned universe.

She had threaded the needle of creation and stabbed the cosmic bullseye.

Kanu closed his eyes, opened them again, hoping that the world would have done the decent thing and changed into a less problematic version of itself.

“There are no nasty surprises,” Swift said, “only degrees of unpreparedness.”

“That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.”

“Welcome to politics.”

“I can’t tell you how much happier I’d be meeting a bunch of artificial intelligences if I also happened to have one on my side.”

“Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”

Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.

“Could be worse, as they say.”

“That’s the sum story of human history, isn’t it? Could be worse. As if that’s the very best that we can manage.”