Diaspora

by Greg Egan

“Play with me!” The orphan had learned to call the fourth citizen “I” or “me” rather than “Yatima”, but that was just grammar, not self-awareness.

even the perfect gravitational parabola of the start of each stream, before the piglets were formed, was nothing but an esthetic choice – and the esthetic itself was nothing but the vestigial influence of flesher ancestry.

Polis citizens, Yatima decided, were creatures of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and everything they could become. However malleable their minds, in a sense they obeyed the same kind of deep constraints as the diamond net – short of suicide and de novo reinvention, short of obliterating themselves and constructing someone new.

this was pandemic. Distorted whole nations’ economies. It had hooks into everything: sexuality, tribalism, half a dozen artforms and subcultures … it parasitized the fleshers so thoroughly you had to be some kind of desert monk to escape it.”

smartphone? lol

“Better gleisners out there than fleshers. Can you imagine statics in space? They’d probably have terraformed Mars by now. The gleisners have barely touched the planet; mostly they’ve just surveyed it from orbit. They’re not vandals. They’re not colonists.”