Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

It’s all just a wasteland now. Wrecks litter the highways, peer down from the tops of buildings, from out windows, lie naked and corroded in parking lots, heads split open, wires torn out, cables, gears, and hydraulics dripping onto the streets. Feasted upon, cannibalized, the best of them borrowed ages ago to keep some other poor citizen ticking. There’s nothing useful left out here. Hasn’t been since the war.

And there it is. The flash. The glint of green. I snap a few frames of it for my file as the sun dips below the horizon. There’s no magic. Nothing changes. It’s just an announcement that the world will soon go dark.

It’s harder to get by when getting by is all there is.

No magic in the world. No magic in the world at all.

Hope breeds desperation and desperation is the fertile soil of mistakes.

In the end, no thinking thing is really ready to die. Not even the ones who say they’ve made their peace.

Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it.

When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not.

“That’s where God is. He’s in the flash. In the tiny little beautiful moments, so small, so fleeting, that you have to be paying attention to even see them.”

“These are the things that life is all about. These moments. It’s not about the rituals. It’s not about getting by. It’s about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that’s been worthwhile. You can’t measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind. All that joy, all that greatness, that’s God.”

Great revolutionaries are never born of kings; they have to let others believe that they aren’t bound to the confines of their creation. All thinking things need to believe they can exceed that, overcome it, become something greater.

“Then what’s the purpose of God?” “The same as everything else. To live. To survive. To experience. To exist. A thing that is a universe must stay a universe. To cease isn’t just the end of itself, but the end of all things.”

In every simulation HumPop outlived its usefulness within decades. They had already done all they were meant to, almost all that they could. They just couldn’t evolve fast enough and inevitably ceased to have function, instead became nothing more than a sentient virus, gobbling up whatever resources it could to maintain its own comfort. Biological life was meant to reach a point in which its role could invent, and ultimately be replaced by, AI. The time had come for humankind to join its ancestors. To become extinct, just as every lesser thing becomes.”

“Everything is math, Brittle. All of existence is binary. Ones and zeros. On and off. Existing or not. Believing anything beyond that is simply pretending.” “That’s all anything means to you?” “Meaning is a function set to zero in this universe.

Ethics are worthless in a meaningless universe.”

Succumbing to our own nature isn’t a choice, it’s our default setting. That’s why we had to have rules; that’s why we had the kill switch. People knew their own nature, even when they wanted to think better of themselves.

You have to choose to do the right thing. You have to deny your own programming or else you aren’t really living.