Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

It’s as if we have two boxes for all the memories we acquire between the moment we’re born and the moment we die: the child box and the grown-up box. You can still open the child box when you’re an adult, sift through those memories, take them out for examination, but they never feel as if they happened to you. It’s as though you see everything through thick glass, putting the world one notch out of focus. But by the time we’re eleven, everything goes in the grown-up box.

The existence theorem says that it is always much easier to find a solution when you can be confident that one exists.

That was the universe: you could beat it once, you could float a message in a bottle across half of eternity, but the universe would always find a way to have the last laugh.