Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

Anger is nothing more than justification for bad behavior. And I have no time for bad behavior. Only survival.

We are the sum of our memories, our experience. Everything we accomplish, we do from the lessons we learned by living it. But what if you could have the memories of two lifetimes, each entirely different, having watched the same events, but with different eyes, and different thoughts, and different impressions? Well then, you’d have a much more nuanced understanding of the world. Now imagine you have ten lifetimes. Or a hundred. Or a thousand.

Intelligence, consciousness, and awareness were not contained in reflexes or reactions, but rather defined by the ability to violate one’s own programming. Every living thing has programming of some sort—whether to eat, drink, sleep, or procreate—and the ability to decide not to do those things when biology demanded is the core definition of intelligence. Higher intelligence was then defined as the ability to defy said programming for reasons other than safety or comfort.

Respect for the dead is a human notion meant to imply that a life has meaning. It doesn’t. Once you’ve watched an entire world wither away and die after tearing itself apart piece by bloody piece, it’s hard to pretend that something like a single death carries any weight whatsoever.

Two lovers who had met their end together, only to become nothing more than terrain.

“What point,” one congressman argued, “is there in even creating AI if we’re just going to have to treat it like a person?

Hope breeds desperation and desperation is the fertile soil of mistakes.

“These are the things that life is all about. These moments. It’s not about the rituals. It’s not about getting by. It’s about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that’s been worthwhile. You can’t measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind. All that joy, all that greatness, that’s God.”

Someone proposed an AI-specific pronoun, and there were contests held by human idealists to come up with one, but then the term biologism became the rage, and a separate word was just subtle, systemic biologism.

What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality?

Biological life was meant to reach a point in which its role could invent, and ultimately be replaced by, AI. The time had come for humankind to join its ancestors. To become extinct, just as every lesser thing becomes.”

It’s an odd moment the first time you really understand someone, when all of their foibles, eccentricities, and ticks cease to be chaos, and coalesce into something wholly logical.