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41 " The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.The stars threw down their spears.Someone smiled. His work to see.The connection broke. "
― Ken MacLeod , The Star Fraction
42 " Terror has to be random...that's how to really break people, when they don't know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble. "
43 " ...I want to attack all these cults and ideologies. I have this, this vision that life could be better if only people could see how things really are. That it's your one life. It's yours, you have this inexhaustible universe to live it in and God damn it isn't that enough? Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens?--all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for. "
― Ken MacLeod
44 " [S]he had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them. "
45 " ... ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they're in as genes are in the bodies they're in: just enough to get themselves copied...Like computer viruses. "
46 " Do AIS dream in electric sleep?He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares. "
47 " ...maybe we can do better than this. And to ask yourself: where's the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems...seamless. What can an individual do against it?... I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people. "
48 " It’s elementary chaos theory, or to give it its popular designation—Murphy’s Law. Random changes happen all the time. Mistakes accumulate. Correcting them brings further changes. As someone smarter than me once said, evolution is smarter than you. "
― Ken MacLeod , The Corporation Wars Trilogy
49 " White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days. "
50 " We’re here now, we have the means to stop the suffering, and therefore the duty to act. "
― Ken MacLeod , Learning the World: A Scientific Romance
51 " The child turned to look at Elizabeth, then stood up. The head was more disproportionately large than that of a human baby. Upon some reassuring noises from the adults, the the young saur ran across the grass and tumbled into Elizabeth's lap. She crooned over it, tickling and stroking; it reached up its clawed fingers to her hair and whistled."Her name is Blathora," said Salasso. "She is two years old." . . ."Sharp teeth," warned Salasso. "And a taste for mammal blood. "
― Ken MacLeod , Cosmonaut Keep (Engines Of Light, #1)
52 " there is only one way this can end: with the kind of defeat that makes a people feel that their preachers have lied to them, their leaders have deserted them, that the world is against them and that God is dead. "
53 " The defining element of hell was eternal conscious suffering. Here "
― Ken MacLeod , Dissidence (The Corporation Wars, #1)
54 " Brides and babies and strong dark men and intellectual and sensual women and the prospect of wide-open spaces to populate with humanity had always made her weak at the knees. "
55 " Poor white trash quoting de Maistre and Carlyle and fancying themselves elite while they scrabbled to survive in a world where they were outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones. "
56 " Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about whether your personalities and sexualities were compatible. "
57 " Fascinating,’ said Darvin. ‘The mystery of life. The miracle of reproduction. I don’t know why I didn’t learn all this in school.’ ‘I did not,’ said Orro. ‘I read it in an imaginative but broadly accurate illustrated treatise inscribed, if memory serves, on the wall of a municipal pissery. "
58 " None of its components were conscious beings. As post-conscious AIs, they were well beyond that. They "
59 " Kindle, ah,’ said Baxter, ‘takes me back. "
― Ken MacLeod , Descent
60 " He'd written some of the movement's earliest manifestos (No More Earthquakes, The Earth is a Harsh Mistress) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists. "