The Expert System's Brother (Expert System, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Her one working eye rolled into her head and the ghostlight flickered in the empty socket of the other and played in a brief halo about her tightly bound hair. She heard the accusations and Sethr’s wheedling denials, but the words went somewhere deeper, to where the ghosts lived. When her lips opened, it wasn’t quite her voice, but something else speaking through her, forcing her throat and tongue to make its words. This was the ghost. This was the Lawgiver.

When we surround ourselves with people who call evil good, how quickly we accept their definitions and speak them back, round and round until every way we experience the world is tainted by it.