Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

I’ve been shut down a few times, for maintenance. There’s nothing. Nothing at all. It’s like no time passes. You feel the fading of the power winding down, and then the rush as you’re flipped back on. There’s no special place in between. No tunnel of light. Not just nothing, but a complete unawareness that there even is a nothing. And that’s where Jimmy went.

Higher intelligence was then defined as the ability to defy said programming for reasons other than safety or comfort.

It’s an odd moment the first time you really understand someone, when all of their foibles, eccentricities, and ticks cease to be chaos, and coalesce into something wholly logical.