A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist. —Guy de Maupassant, “Suicides”

Empire unchecked might be inevitable, but Darj Tarats has within him a quiet, determined, and conniving optimism that unchecked is not the only option available, and has not been for some time.

The name the man had chosen, it turned out, was Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, a revelation that produced in both Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.

THE problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.

Thought again of the City as an algorithm: considered, for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designers. It couldn’t be. There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past—a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed.

A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness. Two minds, together, each contain a vast map of past and present, a vaster projected map of futures—and two minds, together, however close, however entwined, have their own cartography, alien to one another.