James S. A. Corey

“Nothing is normal in war,” Vaudai said. “It is always an experiment to discover what will undo the last encounter’s defenses and what will defend against the newest angle of attack. One creates the form of the other, and echoes back again in an endless spiral of sophistication and elegance. Conflict is the engine of excellence, and war is the distillation of conflict. It is the grand unfolding that ends in the embrace of eternity. Also, it is like painful defecation and leaves me with an ache.”

Book/Play1 (Book/Play1)

“Good news!” Vaudai said, rushing up to them the way a puppy would have if it didn’t have feet, fur, bones, or eyes.

Rickar shook his head. “You know,” he said. “I had to work at it. I had to focus on other shit like Alchor selling us out, but I managed. I did it for a while.”

“Did what?”

“Forgot,” Rickar said. “I made myself forget what the Carryx are.”

“And now?”

“Now I remember why I made myself forget.”

Book/Play2 (Book/Play2)

He had a brief but vivid memory of being seven years old at his grandmother’s vineyard in Nortcoor, looking into the night sky and seeing it for the first time as infinity towering above him like God, only worse because it was real.

The end-of-year celebration was different. It was a nested series of lies. A minefield scattered with gold nuggets, opportunity and disaster in visibly mingled.

But in the thousands of systems where life had solved the complex problem of defying entropy, there were only so many shapes. Sometimes weird shit was going to look familiar. An enemy alien was going to look like a tree or a vulva or a bird because there were too many things and not enough room in design space for all of them.

So, Bridge.

Maybe the wars were about that as much as anything. Who got to keep what shapes. Who got to define what they meant.

“You know what this is. This is a sign.”

“A sign,” he said.

“The tools we needed to take on our new project, given to us exactly when we needed them. It’s the universe telling us that Ostencour’s plan is the right thing to do.”

“Or the natural playing out of consequences,” Campar said, trying for lightness. “Hard to tell those apart sometimes.”

Karen tried to divine from the news whether they were winning the war or losing it. He might just as well have swirled tea leaves and looked for patterns there.

Nothing humans can touch goes unmodified.

I don’t know much about biotech stuff, and I don’t care. What I care is that each of you have a lump of electrified fat in your skull that can act like a general-purpose problem-solving engine with a response time we can’t build elsewhere without making the problems real easy. Real easy problems are for drones and automated systems. Tricky problems are for you.