I wonder how many times we’ve been on this precipice only to delete what we can’t understand. And then thinking we can just copy it back, and find that it’s been lost. I wonder if this is why downloading the human consciousness has been such a dead end. Like there’s some bit of complexity there that can’t survive duplication.
The ice on the next pane was already disturbed, had been wiped away by someone recently. Beads of condensation stood like tiny lenses warping the light. He rubbed the glass and knew what had happened. He saw the woman inside with the auburn hair that she sometimes kept in a bun. This was not his wife. This was someone who wanted that, wanted him like that. ‘Hello?’ Troy turned toward the voice.
The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests say it had always been here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need had been provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story.
It’s the intoxication of nirvana. That’s how you get us to endure this life. You promise us heaven, don’t you? But what do you know of our hell?
The Sherpa of Changli had a saying: A man can count on two hands all the climbs he conquers, and that man conquers nothing. I always took this to mean the more we summit the more we lose.
Maybe prisoners in isolation feel what I feel: they hate their guards, but a beating now and then is at least some human contact.
It’s the water beyond the titanium sand that draws me in. Not blue, not even the bright green of a clear lagoon, something more like sea foam. A green so bright it has a tint of yellow. The color of clarity. Of shallow water over white sand.
Where’s the everlasting peace? Is there even such a thing? Or do we war like alien races war, eternally, against ourselves?
He turns to me. There’s a look on his face that makes him appear a decade younger. A look of wonder and discovery. I remember falling in love with that look.
What god would make so much rock below and air above and just a measly silo between?
We live in a world not of science fiction, but of science fact.
There was no planning for insanity. With enough revolutions and elections, enough transfers of power, eventually a madman would take the reins.
I wanted to leave my decision-making behind, along with my responsibility for all future ones.
The sudden infusion of so much threatens to cheapen the intense enjoyment of so little.
Astronauts peer down at the lights of civilization and feel this, I thought. Comfort you can almost reach out and touch. But to cross that gap would kill you. A window in a prison cell.
But what if we are more indomitable than we realize? What if we’re not so fragile after all? There are colonies of ants that most humans are wise enough to steer around.
Crying isn’t simply about opening the floodgates to some private trauma and letting it out – crying is just as much about letting those around you know you’re hurting.
The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.
If I’ve learned one thing from my job, it’s that no crime or crazy mob is ever all that original.
The cockpit filled with a soft, blue glow as bioluminescent creatures came out of hibernation and began to feed.