Starfish (Rifters, #1)

by Peter Watts

The abyss is a desert; no one can afford the luxury of waiting for better odds.

And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it’s only dark when the lights are on.

If you did things because you were evil, you were in real trouble. If you did the same things because you were sick, though, the doctors would sometimes cover for you. Fischer had learned to be sick.

“Life evolves. Parasites evolve. Sex evolves to counter the parasites. Shuffles the genes so the parasites have to shoot for a moving target. Everything else—species diversity, density-dependence, everything—it all follows from those three laws. You get a self-replicating string past a certain threshold, it’s like a nuclear reaction.”

“Self-awareness results from quantum interference patterns inside neuronal protein microtubules. I have all the parts. I’m conscious.”