"While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's w..."
- Peter Watts
"The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness."
"Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine..."
"You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something."
"So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. Sh..."
"Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again."
"The static’s nice. I could do without the screechi"
"But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go."
"There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative."
"It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven."