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“I’m Engineering. We don’t do ideas.”
Her descendants will tell the story of how Portia entered the temple of the ants and stole the eye of their god.
You know what’s a good lesson of history? You’re screwed if you can’t pay the army.
The only currency we have is freedom,
you’ll be right there with us, Chief Engineer Lain. Perhaps then you might feel like using your expertise to prolong your own life, for once, rather than just to ruin other people’s.”
“The odds are vanishingly unlikely. It wasn’t resource-effective.” “To protect the entire human race?” Nessel demanded, more as a jab at Lain than anything else. “The Gil was designed by engineers, not philosophers.”
“You know that we’ll kill you if you try anything?” he told Lain. “I’m trying to keep track of all the ways this venture is likely to kill me but, yes, that’s one of them.” She looked up at him without flinching. “Seriously,
Who knows what we might have achieved, had we not been so keen to recreate all their follies,
And he realized that it was, of course. He was tethered inextricably to a social species, however much he might fancy himself as a loner. There was, even in Holsten, a desire to interact with other human beings, preserving a bond between himself and everyone else here.
Holsten’s entire civilization into the error of mimicry. In trying to be the ancients, they had sealed their own fate—neither to reach those heights, nor any others, doomed instead to a history of mediocrity and envy.
It was the curse of the Old Empire, that division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress.
spider technology is not metal-heavy, and the organic chemicals more important to them are fabricated from the common building blocks of life itself.
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.
Karst nodded grimly. “That bitch never liked us,” he pointed out. “No way she’d suddenly change her mind.” Several centuries later and a lot of spiders is a long way from “suddenly,” Holsten thought,
Around him, in a network of tunnels and chambers the geography of which is constantly being altered, dwells a colony of a hundred million insects. Their interactions are not as fast as an electronic system built by human hands, but each insect’s tiny brain is itself a capable engine for data storage and decision making, and the overall calculating power of the colony as a whole is something that even it cannot assess. Cloud computing: not speed but an infinitely reconfigurable breadth and complexity. There is more than enough room for the downloaded mind of Avrana Kern.
It took a long time to work out how to do it, but in the end she was only information, after all. Everything is only information, if you have sufficient capacity to encompass it.
We will show them, Portia thinks. We will show them the error of their ways.
Everything can be a tool. Everything is useful.
If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net—what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?
