More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Her descendants will tell the story of how Portia entered the temple of the ants and stole the eye of their god.
Her world is one in which there is no great divide between the thinkers and the thoughtless, only a long continuum.
Who knows what we might have achieved, had we not been so keen to recreate all their follies, he thought now. Could we have saved the Earth? Would we be living there now on our own green planet?
They were part of a species that had become unmoored from time, only their personal clocks left with any meaning for them while the rest of the universe turned to its own rhythms and cared nothing for whether they lived or died.
There is nothing about what we do that is natural. If we prized the natural we would still be hunting Spitters in the wilderness, or falling prey to the jaws of ants, instead of mastering our world. We have made a virtue of the unnatural.
A life lived entirely at the whim of another is no life at all.
It was as if, after so many centuries spent in cold coffins, the human race was unwilling to be freed from their confines.
They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.
A million-year prejudice stares back at him. The ancient cannibal spider, whose old instincts still form the shell within which their culture is nestled, recoils in horror. He sees the conflict within them: tradition against progress, the known past against the unknown future. They have come so far, as a species; they have the intellect to break from the shackles of yesterday. But it will be hard.
Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and to seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.
What is it like to be you? A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.
Our adversary faces the same choice, the same weighting. Even if to welcome us with open arms and have us then play the responsible guest may give the best results all round, the cost of being betrayed is too high. So we can look into the minds of our opponents. We know that they must make the same decision that we must make: because the cost of fighting needlessly is so much less than the cost of opting for peace and getting it wrong. And that same logic will inform the decision of whatever is there, whether it’s a human mind or a machine, or …”
Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy—the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too—conquers all, in the end.
