Saturn's Children

--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...

The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.

The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?

We have chickens! And ostriches—they’re like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyrannosaur—that’s like a really huge chicken, with teeth—but for architectural reasons we can’t let it roam free just yet.

It’s the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who’ll help you out of it

We developed differently, of course, but we all had the same problem.” The yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives. “How can you love yourself if you can’t love somebody else?

When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn’t thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares.

Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.

I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.

(Please excuse my lack of depth; I’m a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying—when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?)

LOOK, DO YOU really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats?

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn’t only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there’d be a queue outside every travel agent.

the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows.

Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky—it

We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms— Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.

Down in the park with a friend called Five.

IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one’s own head—but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship.

I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my need for intimacy.

We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.

crisis. Attempts were made to organize a captive breeding population, but the natural objections of the population in question to being so manipulated—combined with our own innate reflexive obedience— foiled all such programs. We are conditioned to adore and obey our Creators on a personal basis, and while it is easy enough to understand the abstract need to preserve their kind as a whole, the conflict between their specific desires and the needs of the species imposed an impossible burden upon their would-be conservators. We

fewer and fewer of our progenitors were replicating themselves via the weird, squishy process to which they devoted their organs of entertainment.

You want to know what it’s like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company.

They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter.