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“I am unflappable,” Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he’d thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him.
On the long drive home, Laurence tuned out his parents explaining to him that life isn’t an adventure, for chrissake, life is a long slog and a series of responsibilities and demands. When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn’t do what he liked.
And he found himself curious to ask her stuff and see how she responded—because he never, ever knew what Patricia would say about anything. He only knew it would be something weird.
Laurence thought the two women in smart pumps and nylons were life coaches who were coaching each other, creating an endless feedback loop.
Society is the choice between freedom on someone else’s terms and slavery on yours.
ONE DAY THE Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant. Probably not, though.
“You know … no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”
And yeah, there was something both aesthetically pleasing and satisfying about a great piece of engineering. Shiny and sturdy. She felt the same affection for this machine that she did for the old manual typewriters they sold in the hipster gallery on Valencia, or for a nice steam engine. These things were made of hubris, because they always broke down, or worse, broke everything.
“I think I just got bored with it,” Isobel said. “Boredom is the mind’s scar tissue.”
“I mean, we’re grown-ups now. Allegedly. And we feel things less than we did when we were kids, because we’ve grown so much scar tissue, or our senses have dulled. I think it’s probably healthy. I mean, little kids don’t have to make decisions, unless something’s very wrong. Maybe you can’t make up your mind as easily, if you feel too much. You know?”
think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that’s always going to depend on who you’re dealing with.”
For the first time in living memory, she was just a girl who laughed too loud in movie theaters.
“So she’s the one, huh?” Isobel shut the door and smiled. “I thought Serafina was the one.” “So did I. But you know, the heart is not a lie detector. Or something. Falsely identifying the One is part of how you find the One.” He squelched a Matrix joke.
He didn’t have that thing where he forgot for a second how fucked everything was, and then remembered, and then felt his heart break all over again—that would be too easy. Instead, he remembered always. He would feel stricken, doubled over, with grief and misery—and then he would remember how bad it really was and feel worse, as his brain took on a bit more of the weight.
We were trying to create robots that would be able to interact with people’s feelings in a visceral way. But we were focusing on the wrong thing. We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other.”
“But don’t you get that romance is an essentially bourgeois contrivance? At best, it’s anachronistic. At worst, it’s a distraction, a luxury for people who aren’t preoccupied with survival. Why would you waste your time helping people find their ‘true love’ instead of doing something worthwhile?” “Maybe I’m just doing what I can,” Peregrine responded. “Maybe I’m trying to understand people, and helping people fall in love is one way to gain a better sense of your parameters. Maybe increasing the aggregate level of happiness in the world is one way to try and hold back the crash.
The not-understanding was worse than anything else, it was like a mystery and a wound that couldn’t heal and an unforgivable failure.
his life story was the story of Patricia and him, after all, for better or worse, and if she ended his life might go on, but his story would be over.
That thought led her to Ernesto, who was lost in that universe forever and who had said that this planet was a speck and we were all just specks on a speck. But maybe our whole universe was just a speck, too. And it was all part of nature, all of it—every universe and all the spaces in between—as much nature as this Tree in front of her.
“Oh,” Peregrine said. Tendrils were growing out of the Tree’s insides into its network and zipwire ports. Peregrine’s screen involuntarily lit up with a notice that said: “New Network Detected.” “You are,” the Tree said, “like me.” “A distributed consciousness, yes,” Peregrine said. “Although your network is much larger and vastly more chaotic than mine. This may require … a rather ambitious firmware update. Stay tuned.” The screen went dark.
