The Salvage Crew

The soul is in the software, after all.

But God is dead, Hell is empty, and the devils are all here.

I think the idea was to replace humans in war. Yet another bleeding-heart save-the-humans initiative, stalled when some military accounted pointed out that (a) replicants were stupidly expensive and (b) there were more than enough humans walking around for dirt cheap.

Pain is good,” he says softly, as if he didn’t hear me. “Pain is how you know you’re alive.

What doesn’t kill you does make you stranger. The trick is not to let people see it too often.

a human mind with no fear, no happiness, nothing but a limited, artificially induced autism, bent to one task over all. But fear was deemed to be too important a feedback mechanism, too critical to the learning process, so our generation was left with most of our emotions intact, and the vague theory that time would teach us how to make the best use of things.

He said, “Son, life’s like this marching band.” And I, who was expecting something more profound, inquired as to what in the seven hells he meant. “Look closely,” he said. “They’re going to start with numbers that they’re really good at. Things they’ve practiced; things they know they can’t screw up. Then they start getting ambitious; they might pull off a few good riffs here and there. And then the crowd cheers them on, and they get really ambitious, and they go straight into a number way beyond their competence. And you know what that leaves? A sour taste in the mouth.

Planetary Crusade Services. End-to-end interstellar colonization support. We sound like the Pope blessed us to go conquer Space Jerusalem.

Milo shivers. "Winter is coming," he says ominously. I wonder what gave that away. Was it the temperature drop? The chill wind that he intends to use to power the wind turbine? The snow on the ground?

It's an impressive thing, a shard of human ingenuity broken and stuck in this valley and the flowers growing around it like a monument to how far we can come if we put our minds to it.

When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city to see a marching band. He said, "Son, life's like this marching band." And I, who was expecting something more profound, inquired as to what in the seven hells he meant.

And one day I turned back to go home, and I didn't want to. I knew that to go down there to Cassius was to go down to a people who wouldn't understand what I'd become. I had spoken with starships, for God's sake. To go back to the farm was to cut out everything I'd taken in and strip myself down to something I didn't want to be anymore.

We’re parasites on this world, and we’re not even aware of it.

Pain is how you know you’re alive.

And tell ourselves we have seen your northern hills. And dream of work in the morning.

Ah, we have middle management already. Behold civilization, Urmagon Beta. Soon you’ll have overpriced coffee stops, seedy love hotels, and monks signing autographs

Fight me, you horrible wet thing.