Echopraxia (Firefall, #2)

by Peter Watts

“But if the mission does go pear-shaped, wouldn’t you rather die in your sleep than be wide awake and screaming when you get sucked into space?”

It was a window in the crudest possible sense: a solid pane of transparent alloy, set into the rear bulkhead. You couldn’t zoom it or resize it or lay a tactical false-color overlay across its surface. You couldn’t even turn it off, unless someone on the other side brought down the blast shield.

natural selection favors the paranoid.

“It’s been a while,” Moore said, “since I’ve had much call to deal with my own kind.”

The gradient of Life was the first scale any aspiring biologist learned to sing: the further you kept yourself from thermodynamic equilibrium, the more alive you were.

“And how does it feel to know our lives depend on the judgment of something that can’t even imagine it could die?”

“A stealth supernet fine-tuned for the manipulation of pawns with a specific skill set suited to military applications. And it just emerged?” Moore smiled faintly. “Of course. No complex finely tuned system could ever just evolve. Something must have created it.” Ouch, Brüks thought. “I’ll admit I’ve heard that argument before,” Moore said. “I just never thought I’d hear it from a biologist.”

What was her grudge, next to all these other terrors closing in on all sides? It was a rhetorical question, of course. Sure the universe was full of terrors. She was the only one he’d brought upon himself.

Maybe the Singularity already happened and its components just don’t know it yet.