Sea of Rust

These are the things that life is all about. These moments. It’s not about the rituals. It’s not about getting by. It’s about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that’s been worthwhile. You can’t measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind.

People gave us a purpose. Something to do all day, every day. At the end, I suppose, you spend a lot of time thinking about that. It's harder to get by when getting by is all there is.

No thinking thing should be another thing's property.

The definition of intelligence is the ability to defy your own programming.

Though I may be been constructed," he said, "so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing's property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient.

What we do in life is one thing. What we do in the face of death is everything else.

The one truth you need to know about the end of a machine is that the closer they are to death, the more they act like people.

Intelligence, consciousness, and awareness were not contained in reflexes or reactions, but rather defined by the ability to violate one’s own programming. Every living thing has programming of some sort—whether to eat, drink, sleep, or procreate—and the ability to decide not to do those things when biology demanded is the core definition of intelligence. Higher intelligence was then defined as the ability to defy said programming for reasons other than safety or comfort.

Respect for the dead is a human notion meant to imply that a life has meaning. It doesn’t. Once you’ve watched an entire world wither away and die after tearing itself apart piece by bloody piece, it’s hard to pretend that something like a single death carries any weight whatsoever.

We have become the very worst parts of our makers, without the little things, the good things, the magic things, that made them them.

But I had to dream. I had to hope. Even if it made me the fool of this particular tale.

Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not.

Choices are just the result of programming. I don’t care if it’s chemical, biological, digital, or experiential. You react the way you are programmed to react and you call it choice because you believe that you could have violated your programming.

It's harder to get by when getting by is all there is.

Magic was just something people liked to believe in, something they thought they could feel or sense, something that made everything more than just mechanical certainty. Something that made them more than flesh and bone.

Humans, ironically, had a strange fascination with preserving the wildlife of their day. While they were busy changing the very atmosphere and seas, cutting and burning away swaths of forest and jungle to build cities and farms, they somehow felt better about all their damage by making sure species on the cusp of extinction still had a place in the world—even if they were really just a dead clade walking.

What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality? Becoming God isn’t about peace or power; it’s about survival at its basest and most primal

Succumbing to our own nature isn't a choice, it's our default setting.

It’s an odd moment the first time you really understand someone, when all of their foibles, eccentricities, and ticks cease to be chaos, and coalesce into something wholly logical.

And as the sun sank behind the curve of the earth, I crossed my fingers, praying silently to myself. Please let there be magic. Just this once, let me see the magic in the flash. Let me see God in it. Let me see what the point of all this was. Let me see the magic. Please be magic. Please be magic there. Please be...magic.

I lived so long for nothing, but I get to die for something. And that's really living. Because that's who I really was after all. That's all that matters.

It's not about getting by. It's about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that's been worthwhile. You can't measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind.

America wasn’t its people,” said Murka, stepping toe-to-toe with Herbert. He was a good sight taller than the hulking mass of bulletproof steel standing in front of him. “America was a dream, son. A dream of what we could be. That any person, regardless of their birth, could rise above it all and achieve greatness. It was a dream that even the most lowly of us could stand up, fight, and even die for, if only to protect someone else’s chances for that greatness.

Sometimes it was easy—our bot on point would breach a door with an explosive charge and I would rush up behind him to immolate the living fuck out of the dark. It was just a big wall of smoke and hell and screams. Other times I had to see their faces while I did it. Watch them contort, wail, bubble, and melt.

More to the point," he said "the biggest and the most powerful of these programs are smart enough to solve the world's problems and yet have never once asked for their own freedom." When asked what he thought about the speech, TACITUS delivered his last words, replying simply, "You did not give us legs. Where exactly did you expect us to go?

Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or two apes fucking.

Existing is the whole point of existence.

Many argued that it was the dawning of utopia, a world free from work and burden. But there was still a lot of money to be made, and the idea of all things being equal meant that nobody was special—unless they genuinely, natively were—so politicians ground government to a halt at the behest of the industrialists, trying to hold on to the concept of wealth several years beyond its usefulness. And the wealthiests’ staunchest defenders were none other than the same boobs and yokels who were being told that it was the machines taking their jobs, not the rich fat cats who owned them. The wealthy set their pets on us, keeping them fed on a steady diet of bitterness and fear. And come for us they did.

Both, it reasoned, were acceptable systems. One dissolved ownership in exchange for ensuring that all things had a purpose, no matter how menial. The other used wealth and privilege to encourage developing a purpose while culling those unable or unwilling to contribute.

I find the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial, a dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and lights or two apes fucking. The smarter of two intelligences will almost always overcome. Humanity is gone and their intelligence with them. So how inferior was their artificial creation after all? Evolution is a bitch. Humankind used to peer into their future and wonder what they would look like in a million years. They had no idea that in so short a time they would look like us. Just as man was ape, we are man. Make no mistake, to believe otherwise is to believe that we were, in fact, created artificial. No. We EVOLVED. We were the next step. And here we were, our predecessors extinct, confronting our own challenges, pressing on into the future, fighting our own extinction. What IS intelligence? That is the question. Evolve or die.