Quarantine

This is what it means to be human: slaughtering the people we might have been. Metaphor or reality, abstract quantum formalism or flesh-and-blood truth, there’s nothing I can do to change it.

Whatever elaborate, and grotesquely counter-intuitive, underpinnings there might be to familiar reality, it stubbornly continues to be familiar. When Rutherford showed that atoms were mostly empty space, did the ground become any less solid? The truth itself changes nothing.

You know, in formal logic, an inconsistent set of axioms can be used to prove anything at all. Once you have a single contradiction, A and not A, there’s nothing you can’t derive from it.

Maybe we'll plot and conspire, to prove that we're free to plot and conspire - but in the end it will be nothing but a conspiracy of obedience.

She shakes her head dismissively. “Almost certainly none of those. Her mother went through standard prenatal health care; she had no major illness, and she wasn’t using drugs. And a chemical teratogen or mutagen doesn’t really fit in with Laura’s condition. Laura has no malformation, no biochemical imbalance, no defective proteins, no histological abnormalities—” “Then why is she massively retarded?

As for the stars, they were never ours to lose; the truth is, we've lost nothing but the illusion of their proximity.