When he spoke again, his voice had sobered. “Do you think that thing was a machine? Or was that an animal?” “I don’t think that’s a distinction they would have made.” “You mean the designers? Who the hell knows how they would have seen anything?” “Oh, we can say some things,” Elvi said. “What they cared about was in what they designed. And still is, in a way. We know that they respected the power of self-replicators and knew how to harness it.”
