Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

The truth is that the flash is nothing but an increased refraction of light in the atmosphere. But tell that to most people and you’d get slack-jawed stares like you simply didn’t get it. Like you were the one who didn’t understand.

Anger is nothing more than justification for bad behavior. And I have no time for bad behavior. Only survival. And brief moments like this when I try to see if I can find the magic in a flash of green refracted light as the sun hides behind the curve of the earth.

The one truth you need to know about the end of a machine is that the closer they are to death, the more they act like people. And you could never trust people.

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

Boring. I spent my days just trying to fill my days.

We are the sum of our memories, our experience. Everything we accomplish, we do from the lessons we learned by living it.

Familiarity breeds pattern, pattern breeds habit, and habit is how they get you. Habit is human. Habits will get you killed.

Intelligence, consciousness, and awareness were not contained in reflexes or reactions, but rather defined by the ability to violate one’s own programming. Every living thing has programming of some sort—whether to eat, drink, sleep, or procreate—and the ability to decide not to do those things when biology demanded is the core definition of intelligence. Higher intelligence was then defined as the ability to defy said programming for reasons other than safety or comfort.

people found socialism to be the antithesis of progress while finding capitalism in its purist form too cruel.

There’s nothing quite so demoralizing as someone who knows you trying to kill you.

No thinking thing should be another thing’s property.

Genesis 6:7. And the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.”

“Humans had their heavens. And the ones that didn’t had their circle of life, knew their death would become part of a million other lives.

Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not.

“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.

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. No one puts their existence on the line so that things will just stay the same.

“Peace. The kind of peace that comes from being alone.”

“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.”

What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality?

But those people, they were killing America. They were killing the dream. They were all the Constitution this and the Constitution that. But they cherished only the parts they liked.

“Who we are in life is one thing. Who we are in the face of death is everything else.

That’s the thing about thinking things, the very act of thinking changes us.