Déjà Vu Quotes

“Don’t you see?” I watch with fascination rather than horror as a chain of explosions breaks the back of the Intrepid. “We’re dead. We’re already dead.” The hull of the Intrepid flexes, buckling beneath us. Explosions race toward us in silence, threatening to consume us. There’s no time to act. There’s barely time to utter one last sentence before we’re caught in the inferno. “We’ve probably been dead for centuries.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“As nervous as we are, they’re shitting themselves.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Stop is a relative term in space. Everything is in motion. Although it feels as though we’re floating stationary, we’re hurtling toward the Moon at the rate of seven miles a second. If we were able to fly low over the coast back on Earth, it would be a case of “Blink and you’ll miss us.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Given we’re a male/female crew, Victory settled on the module designations Romeo and Juliet for our modules. She thought it was a fitting tribute to historical figures. I didn’t have the heart to tell her they were fictional characters. By the end of Shakespeare’s play, they’re both dead, but no one on New Earth knows that. I sure as hell hope that ain’t an omen.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“There are a few splutters from one of the engines. The rocket surges for a couple of seconds, with the thrust coming in waves. I tense up, anticipating the worst. I’m expecting the whole crazy thing to die. If it does, we’ll experience weightlessness for a few seconds before plunging back to Earth like a cannonball. Given how far we’ve traveled downrange, it’ll be a case of, Hello, Morocco!”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Any exploding rocket is jokingly referred to as an unscheduled rapid disassembly. Given the rigorous testing of every nut and bolt, failure isn’t random. If a rocket explodes, it goes boom for a reason. There’s a cascade of components that have to fail before there are any fireworks. Disasters unfold sequentially. Based on the examples they showed me at the academy, there was generally a second or two of abnormal behavior before anything went bang. Our entire flight is abnormal. I’m hoping our version of abnormal is the new norm and we’re going to get lucky.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Rockets are precise. They’re marvels of engineering. Failure doesn’t come out of nowhere. Any exploding rocket is jokingly referred to as an unscheduled rapid disassembly.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“I regret not taking up the option of touring these facilities back then. Seeing frozen liquid oxygen being produced by a society that has only just mastered the plow is pretty damn impressive. ”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“The flight controllers had ice in their veins. Neil and Buzz trusted their instincts. If it had been me in that lander, I would have had my finger hovering over that goddamn abort button the whole way down. Those two? They had nerves made from titanium. ”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“It’s a long way from an abacus to artificial intelligence, but the basic principles are the same—extend human logic.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Space is unforgiving. The temperature extremes alone can warp materials. And space is big. Orbital mechanics make everything more complex. A minor inaccuracy here and you miss going there. In the early years, over half of the missions to Mars failed. They either missed the planet or added to its list of craters. As for the Moon, the first few robotic missions slammed into the damn thing because no one knew how to land.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“We will succeed,” she says with the blind confidence that has been the hallmark of human failure over the centuries. I bite my tongue. I don’t want to be negative. I get what they’re trying to do. And I agree with the importance of what they’re doing. They’re effectively trying to drag themselves up by their bootstraps. It’s human. We can’t help but try. It’s in our nature. I nod, thinking carefully about my next few words. There’s a lot of things I could say, but what’s needed is some gravity.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Our first salvage was from the Mercury monument in Flow-rider. You can’t imagine our delight when we found out the first astronauts were monkeys and chimps.” I smile. Flow-rider is a rather apt term for Florida.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Luna,” I say. “The Moon.” “Yes. Yes. Loaner. The Moan.” “Close enough,”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“This is nuts. Why are they worshiping me? If this is a virtual world, what’s the reasoning behind all this? This is just crazy enough to be real. I feel like my head is about to explode. Focus, Jess. Look at this beautiful specimen of a horse standing before you. I love horses. Who doesn’t? Seriously, the only people that don’t like horses are psychopaths. Such grace. Such strength. Such beauty. I rub her neck. She has a light brown complexion checkered with pale patches. Although her face is brown, her mane is as white as the driven snow.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Xerxes looks magnificent. His body is mirrored, catching the light around us. There are no flat surfaces, so the reflection coming off him is distorted—no seams, no joints, no smudges, no imperfections. It’s as though the statue of David has been dipped in silver and highly polished—minus only a penis.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“You’re a baby,” he says, raising his chin as he laughs at me. If I wasn’t virtual, I’d slap him into the next century.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“I speak the Old Tongue, as they call it. Here am I, telling them they can’t trust their implants. They can’t even talk to me without them. It’s like telling an American in Moscow not to use Google Translate. How the hell are they going to understand anything?”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Everything was built by AI.” “Ah, yes. The artificialness of intelligence. It is a blessing and a curse. Our savior. Our archangel became our demon.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“To think that once people sunbathed, deliberately damaging their skin to somehow ‘look beautiful’ seems crazy now. By my time, it was recognized as foolish, but still, some young people persisted in getting a tan. As a species, we sure have been dumb.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“There was only so much that could be done to tweak a cell’s telomeres and defy death.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“astonished that out of all the things to survive from my culture it would be a soft drink. I doubt these guys even know what a coke from my era tastes like.  Then again, the version they sold while I was growing up was nothing like the original. For all I know, it could have reverted to its roots by now and once again contain actual cocaine. Perhaps no longer in trace amounts.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Four thousand years may have passed, but white hats still designate fire chiefs.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Why are you doing this?” “Tell me why it isn’t… possible.” “You’re a parasite—feeding off the colony.” “Kids standing on a street corner in Nebraska.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“I’m not afraid of you.” I’m lying, but hey, that’s what we humans do best. “You can’t hurt me.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“abandoned once more, left alone on a strange moon a bazillion miles from Earth? I’m not sure how long I lie there, slipping in and out of a listless sleep. I’d like to think it’s moonlight drifting in through the windows, but we’re on a moon. I guess it’s starlight, or perhaps a little planet-shine.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“Jorgensen’s smart. Ask the hologram about reality—that’ll work. He’s cagey, but I understand why. I’m a relic. Worse, I’m a lab rat. From his perspective, I’m not his equal. I’m a scientific experiment under observation.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“You’re nothing.” “You think I’m nothing?” I say. “You’re nothing more than a squishy membrane stuffed full of loosely arranged energetic particles. That’s all any of us ever are.” I point at the light streaming in through the window. “Every element in your body can be found in the heart of that goddamn star. The only difference is those atoms are far more energetic than yours, by a factor of at least a thousand. And yet those atoms aren’t alive—yours are. Why? “Do you want to talk to me about life? I’ll tell you about life. Life isn’t a thing, it’s a state. Life is a delicately balanced process sustained by a trillion other interconnected processes. Yours depend on biology. Mine are governed by a digital heartbeat, but they’re just as real.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“None. There’s not one of them that, under a microscope, is any different from those produced by a basic chemistry set. Biology is an illusion of physics and chemistry, that’s all.” The council chair is a young man, which surprised me when I first saw him. In my time, it was the old farts that ran the show. He speaks over the top of me, but the timing gap makes it difficult to pull off. His words come through slightly out of sync. “You’re nothing.” “You think I’m nothing?” I say. “You’re nothing more than a squishy membrane stuffed full of loosely arranged energetic particles. That’s all any of us ever are.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu

“There’s nowhere to sit, nowhere to come to a halt other than in the middle of the floor. Yeah, this place is about exercising power indiscriminately. I’d pity the poor sap that has to stand here in judgment if that sap wasn’t me.”
― Peter Cawdron, Déjà Vu