Starfish (Rifters, #1)

by Peter Watts

She shifts on the pallet, turns to face the inside wall. Her reflection stares back at her through eyes like frosted glass. She watches the image, admires its perfect mimicry of each movement. Flesh and phantom move together, bodies masked, faces neutral.

But it must be light-years. The ocean is full of stars.

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

There’s a moment of absolute darkness while her eyecaps adjust to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.

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

It no longer feels like drowning. It feels like being born again.

wondering when the term “job security” had become an oxymoron.

a blunt hydraulic press forcing them all into shapes of its own choosing.

We talk in whispers here,

“I thought so,” he says, as though she has. “It’s really kind of … well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ’em. We’re all beautiful.”

“I’m not nearly old enough to be your father.”

“A starfish,” Acton tells her, “is the ultimate democracy.” Clarke stares, quietly repelled. “This is how they move,” Acton is saying. “They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy.”

“You’re in the land of the blind,” she says curtly. “It’s not a drawback.”

“You don’t have the slightest control over what you are.”

Brander holds up a finger. “‘Self-replicating information strings evolve as a sigmoid-difference function of replication error rate and generation time’” Two fingers. “‘Evolving information strings are vulnerable to parasitism by competing strings with sigmoid-difference functions of lesser wavelength’.” Three. “‘Strings under pressure from parasites develop random substring-exchange protocols as a function of the wavelength ratio of the host and parasite sigmoid functions.’ Or something like that.” Caraco looks at Clarke, then back at Brander. “What?” “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.”

“You’ve heard the phrase ‘entropy increases’? Everything falls apart eventually. You can postpone it for a while, but that takes energy. The more complicated the system, the more energy it needs to stay in one piece. Back before us everything was sun-powered, all the plants were like these little solar batteries that everything else could build on. Only now we’ve got this society that’s on an exponential complexity curve, and the Net’s on the same curve, only a lot steeper, right? So we’re all balled up in this runaway machine, it’s got so complicated it’s always on the verge of flying apart, and the only thing that prevents that is all the energy we feed it.”

“They should just shut the whole bloody Net down for a while,” Caraco is saying behind her. “Just pull the plug. Bugs wouldn’t be able to handle that, I bet.” Brander laughs, comfortably blind. “Probably not. Of course, neither would the rest of us.”

sated on junk food. It kept returning, but it never learned.

This some sort of Asian real-estate scam?

ten thousand years of social Darwinism and four billion years of Darwin Classic before that,

Simple or complex. File or infection. Checkers or chess. βehemoth or biosphere. It was all the same problem, really. Twelve-eleven knew exactly which side it was on.

I put all these words together myself. However, I shamelessly exploited anyone I could to put them together properly.