Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Architects had discovered that humans existed. The war, which had raged for eighty years and cost billions of lives, had been fought without the knowledge of one of its parties. And on becoming aware of humanity, the Architects had simply vanished. Nobody knew where they went. Nobody knew where they had come from or why they’d done what they did. They had never been seen again.

yelled. “In times of stress, have you considered singing happy songs?” Medvig, as an intelligence distributed across a knot of cyborg roaches, loved highlighting human frailties.

Idris, who sometimes felt he was built entirely out of competing vulnerabilities, valued them in other people.

“They train us to talk about it. They train us to heal, and not to deny we’re in pain. Rock-hard is brittle.”

the abyss that gazed also.

“A bunch of clever women decided that they would go grow a whole load of other women in test tubes, because they hated men?” Olli said, going from a standing start to staggeringly undiplomatic in record time. “Wasn’t that it?”

“The Parthenon was founded because of good people. Parsefer and her fellows looked at the way Earth had gone and saw inequality, exploitation, divisions, hatred and ignorance. They wanted to start again and do better. And if you’re boosting your population through vat-parthenogenesis, it’s easier just to work with the female line.” Idris reckoned that was both a simplified and sanitized explanation, but perhaps it was what Solace believed.

The Hanni didn’t wage war, funnelling all their disagreements into a myriad of contests.