Karen tried to divine from the news whether they were winning the war or losing it. He might just as well… — James S. A. Corey

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.

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.

“The central government—” he began, and Piotr shook his head.”

“The government’s just people. A bunch of clueless assholes just like us who get paid to take the fact that there’s a bunch of monsters out there looking to kill us and put a brave face on it. They just want to make sure we don’t panic.”