Home > Work > Blindsight (Firefall, #1)
21 " You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones. "
― , Blindsight (Firefall, #1)
22 " I think I’ll call you Cygnus,” Chelsea said.“The swan?” I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse.She shook her head. “Black hole. Cygnus X-1. "
23 " Szpindel’s eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillars. "
24 " How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war? "
25 " The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. "
26 " I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions. "
27 " She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There’s a reason fuckcubbies don’t come with fluorescent lights. "
28 " Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway. "
29 " Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black. "
30 " People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think. "
31 " This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams. "
32 " I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.To this day, I still don't know what went wrong. "
33 " Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. "
34 " I really wanted to talk to her.I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit. "
35 " Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing. "
36 " My genes done gone and tricked my brainBy making fucking feel so greatThat's how the little creeps attainTheir plan to fuckin' replicateBut brain's got tricks itself, you seeTo get the bang but not the biteI got this here vasectomyMy genes can fuck themselves tonight.- The R-Selectors, Trunclade "
37 " but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it’s a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It’s noble, it’s maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. "
38 " Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed. "
39 " Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat? "
40 " What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive? "