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You’re ruled by your machines. You’re an evolutionary dead end.
“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,”
A Changer was a threat to anybody who ruled by force, either of will or of arms.
Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise.
The empty suit was like the abandoned cocoon of some metamorphosed animal, riding opened and empty, seeming just above the surface of the waves behind.
The Culture was every single individual human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs.
This was what the Culture offered, this was its signal, its advertisement, its legacy: chaos from order, destruction from construction, death from life.
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
We are self-altering, we meddle with the code of life itself, re-spelling the Word which is the Way, the incantation of being. Interfering with our own inheritance, and interfering in the development of other peoples
she was doomed to die here, a hundred meters from safety and escape—but held from it by a set of faithful, automatic, unconscious circuits….
