Standback

“That contraption -- listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn't believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying soul. Can the principle of a 'thinking machine' -- man-made -- be a rational soul? Bah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know what?"

"Father?"

"Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think! It knows good and evil, I tell you, and it chose the latter.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“I don’t have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgotten.
-- "Erase, Erase, Erase”
― Elizabeth Bear

“It is done, then," Okaios said. "I supposed this was better than the alternative."

The sadness in his voice reminded Mera of an owner who has lost his prize pet. "No," she said. "A better alternative would have been no one dying."

"Then how would they learn?" Okaios asked.”
― Cadwell Turnbull, The Lesson

“The proclamation had been very clear: All eligible maidens were to attend. All. High or low estate, fat or thin, short or tall, one leg or two. In one week's time, the prince was going to pick a pretty girl from the crowd and make a princess of her. To most women in the kingdom, it was as though God had extended His hand to them.

But not to the seamstresses.

To old Clara Le Dure, it seemed the king had decided this was the week she ought to die. He was personally seeing to it that she should stitch herself into oblivion.”
― Auston Habershaw, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2020