Axiom's End (Noumena, #1)

by Lindsay Ellis

Black olives. The answer to the eternal quandary of what if one were to combine snails and old tires into a foodstuff. The only way the creature could have punished her more brutally was if it had forced celery on her.

ORTEGA: I’m not that naive. I’m aware that dropping our guns in some countries, removing our spies in others—that would cause chaos. But there is a sickness in my country and my culture—a sickness of manipulating the masses, of hiding the truth from them. Immediate transparency wouldn’t cure us of them, but the doing of deeds that even need to be hidden in the first place—that is our sickness.

“You are the civilization that disproves this axiom. You would be both the greatest discovery in the history of the Superorganism and the greatest threat to its conception of itself as divinely unique.”

“Trauma can cause cognitive impairment in all sapient species.”