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We profess an inordinate fondness for beetles.
We seek for every possibility of life and sentience, because the universe is vast and cold and mostly empty, and variance from that void is to be treasured.
We are a thing of understandings. When we were a thing of sentience but no understanding, we did things we will not repeat. All innocent, in a way, but sometimes that’s no excuse.
“Me? I don’t know anything.” Gethli widens his eyes, making his face as vacant as can be. “But I’m good at working things out. Gothi’s terrible at puzzles, but she knows everything we ever saw.” “You’re the Witch’s familiars?” He cocks his head. “Perhaps Gothi’s the familiar, and I’m the novel.”
She has the definite sense of moving into something like a story. Not a book-story, but something like a page torn from one, ragged edged, starting and ending mid-sentence, forever lost from its proper place.
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,”
Because Miranda has never known death, really. Parting, yes, but that’s an open-ended grief, a curve that may one day become a circle. Death is a straight line; ask any medical professional.
His voice is very calm, not eaten up with hate but a man who’s at the top of the world, if only because the world is all falling downwards right now.
“We think that it is better not to be sentient. Imagine how hard that would be, to actually have to think about things all the time.”
Sufficiently advanced instinct is indistinguishable from intelligence? Is that where we are, then? Or sufficiently advanced programming in my case. But I feel that I am sentient. But then you can tell a computer that anything is true, and it will have no choice but to believe it. Humans and the rest, they feel sentient, surely. But what do they know?
