Alastair Reynolds

Welcome to politics, Doctor. We don’t get to pick our allies. The best we can hope for is that we don’t despise them quite as much as our enemies.

“I had you down as a xenophobic zealot,” Quillen said. “I didn’t realize you were also a sadist.”

“We all have our hidden depths.”

“We’re pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we’ve even got machines in the Oort cloud. That’s where it gets stickier. If we’re going to do anything useful out there, we’ll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers.”

“You’re not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago,” Geoffrey said.

“Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It’s going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.”

Do you see us slavering for revenge, that most pointlessly biological of imperatives?

We were sowing so much misinformation that some of it came back and bit us.

She was pointing into the empty, angel-less heavens beyond.

Everything else. The universe.

Open your story-cube on the way home and ask it to tell you about causality violation. I did once, because I asked the same question you did. Why should I be limited? What right does the universe have to say what I can and can’t do? I’m intelligent. The universe is just a lot of hydrogen and dirt, going through the motions. But in this instance the universe has the final say.

The air crackled with rivalry and the potential for swift backstabbing.

Geoffrey hadn’t sensed anything like it since his last academic conference.

“And you do not think that this is possible?”

“I’ll believe in anything when I see evidence for it.”

Sorry, Campion, but we can’t trust Lady Luck any more. Lately she’s taken to pissing on us from a great height.

“I know what you’re feeling," Meroka said. “You’re thinking, this was my little adventure, it was all revolving around me. And now it’s not. You’re just a detail, swept up in the stuff she’s making happen. Welcome to the way most of us spend our lives feeling, Cutter. We’re just turds swirling our way down the pipe.”

Hopefully they’ll accept me for what I am, not what I was. That’s all we can ever hope for, isn’t it?