Karl Schroeder

“The being was trying to get him to think about what he was saying, not just recite.”

“In such a way she had done what her people prized above all else: she had given her respect to those different from herself.”

“Idiots. They were losing everything because of their short-sightedness. Maybe they deserved to lose it.”

““I am the Government,” she said. “I am a force of omniscience and unparalleled power within the human part of the Archipelago. I am a public-domain distributed artificial intelligence. I have made all human institutions redundant, for I am the personal and intimate friend of each and every one of the trillion humans under my domain. I am the selfless advocate of each of them, from the lowliest to the greatest.The only problem is...Well, nobody listens to me much anymore.””

“They see something they may never have seen before: a normal human reacting normally to a traumatic situation. Livia, these people have been insulated within inscape their whole lives. They have lived in a world where their merest whim could be granted with a thought. Reality has always conformed to their desires—never the other way around. Now they find themselves in a world that obstinately refuses to change itself to fit their imagination. They literally have no idea how to respond.”

““I haven’t organized my life as a narrative, you know. I’m not sure you’ll understand.”“As listeners, we are not required to understand,” said Qiingi. “Only to care.””

““The great commandment of the narratives is that your life must be meaningful,” said Charon. “If knowing the truth strips the meaning away, then the truth must be suppressed.””

“What’s real is what’s valuable. Everything else is just an illusion.”

“Even the gods fight boredom in vain.”

“Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She’d known that. But on Earth, in the Archipelago and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accommodate them. Under the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies...The locks proclaimed that there were no neutral technologies. The devices and methods people used didn’t just represent certain values—they were those values, in some way.”

“But what good’s abundance if nobody can experience it?”

“That’s what being human means: to be master of your own fate.”

“Our whole life we’ve lived in a world of softened edges and easy decisions. All except once. One time, when someone had to look at the world through adult eyes and even the grown-ups who survived the crash with us failed the test. Someone had to look at the world as it was, and make the hard decisions that were necessary—not to romanticize, not to retreat into illusions. You did it then. I’m asking you to do it again. See what’s really going on here. See what’s real.”

“Only the dead are free of the influence of others.”

““Technologies are control systems,” she said. “They dictate your reality.””