Quotes from Peter Watts

You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

So. The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality. At

Cities are the graveyard of Mankind.

Brüks digested that. "Well, if it was supposed to be some kind of compliment, her delivery needs work. You'd think someone with all that brainpower would be able to cobble together a few social skills." "Funny thing"—Moore's voice was expressionless—"Sengupta couldn't figure out how someone with all your interpersonal skills could be so shitty at math.

It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they're coded the right way. It's all just pattern.

Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one's mind even at today's rudimentary levels of connectivity. The "transactive memory system" called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.74 And Google doesn't come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.

She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated. She swirled before me like a school of fish.

But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke's liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one's looking.

So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.

Black holes are the ultimate garbage can.

The smallest multicorp killed more people than all the sex killers who ever lived, for a fucking profit margin—and the WTO gave them awards for it.

Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillars.

Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually.

Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgements, didn't care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence.

It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.

What, you stay awake when you exercise? You don't find it, um, boring?

Brüks had never been entirely clear on what an omniscient being would need a computer for. Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn't diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)

rigor vitae

Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once.

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES. —OLD ECOLOGIST'S PROVERB

Intuition is not clairvoyance. It's not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously—but no less rigorously—than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person.

What do you think vision is?" she asked him. "You don't see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are deceptive. Hell, color doesn't even exist outside your own head. Vision's just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you're going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.

God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and His name is Physics.

We all come into the story half way through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.