More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb.
Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.
But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat? Of course we are people, don’t be ridiculous. But thee? We just can’t be sure.
“When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light-years.”
I don’t know why you would even bring up the Internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you.
Wormhole or no wormhole had just as little to do with the inherent superiority and/or possibly divine mandate of the smirking bastards who won the cosmic draw as cow or no cow, and yet, everyone everywhere will do, say, and stab nearly anything if it means they get to believe that they are blessed and their neighbors are basically toad-people.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t equal. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, since you could no more move an active wormhole than you could move a politician to pity.
The walls of any given wormhole are infested with indecipherable graffiti in ancient, impossible tongues, the only evidence of entire cauterized timelines and vast unspeakable intelligences trapped on the other side of the cohesion matrix, as well as whether or not Ursula Was Here. You are almost certain to get gum or vomit or causality or all three on your shoes.
Their language is nothing but umlauts.
The giant panda eats bamboo. The wormhole eats regret.
Where wood has burned, there will be ash. The waste product of the constantly dividing multiverse is a fine, drifting mist of regret, and no wormhole has ever starved.
Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?
Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.
People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters.
Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down.
It’s not your fault the average Pomeranian has better ears than Mozart on a good day.” Zaraz rolled his eyes and recited his mantras: “I am not morally superior, more deserving of love and wealth, or more fun at parties just because they’re both deaf compared to me. You can choose your friends, you can choose your outfit, but you can’t choose the environmental conditions that led to the evolution of your specialized anatomy.”
There are, naturally, a few asexual species, and they do seem to get a lot more done in a day, but even they give it a try once in a while, just to see what all the fuss is about, before shrugging and going back to grounding their self-esteem in concrete accomplishments and finding fulfillment in skills and hobbies like the twisted kinksters they are.
