It’s very nearly 1989 but it’s midnight in the Dark Ages just the thickness of a book away, the thickness of… — Iain M. Banks

I looked at Li. “An argument? All right; you—anybody—taking command of the ship is like a flea taking over control of a human... maybe even like a bacteria in their saliva taking them over.”

“But why should it command itself? We made it; it didn’t make us.”

“So? And anyway we didn’t make it; other machines made it... and even they only started it off; it mostly made itself. But anyway, you’d have to go back... I don’t know how many thousand generations of its ancestors before you found the last computer or spaceship built directly by any of our ancestors. Even if this mythical ‘we’ had built it, it’s still zillions of times smarter than we are. Would you let an ant tell you what to do?”

“Bacterium? Flea? Ant? Make up your mind.”

“Oh go away and de-scale a mountain or something, you silly man.”

“But we started all this; if it hadn’t been for us—”

“And who started us? Some glop of goo on another rockball? A supernova? The big bang? What’s starting something got to do with it?”

“You don’t think I’m serious, do you?”

“More terminal than serious.”

There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.

We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It’s all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, a brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder.