Walter Jon Williams amerikai

Aristide sighed. „How old is he?”
„A hundred and… thirty-something, I think.”
„Let him grow another thousand years, and maybe he'll have something worthwhile to say.”

Chapter 4

It was difficult in the modern world for anyone to stay dead for very long.

Chapter 12

“My lord?” said Cadet Seisho. “I’m looking at a transmission, and Recruit Levoisier says something about the captain that I’m not sure about…”
Martinez glanced at his sleeve display, which showed the cadet’s smooth-cheeked face. “Does she say that she’s going to kill the captain, maim him, assault him, or disobey the captain’s orders?”
Seisho blinked. “No, my lord. It’s…more personal than that.”
More personal? Martinez wondered. Then he decided it was better not to know. “If it’s not assault, death, disobedience, or sabotage, it’s not treason,” he said. “Pass it.”

Chapter Nine

Steward lay on his rack, watching a telecast of Kawaguchi’s Fourth Millennium. This was a classic visionary Imagist drama from the previous century, set in a mannered future in which a genetically altered posthuman society was confronted by the return of violent human primitives from a forgotten space colony, a comedy of manners laced with acid and appalling violence.

Chapter Ten

„People may demand leaders who promise them absolute security — and the sort of leaders who promise absolutes are not, historically speaking, the kind you actually want running your nation.”

Chapter 22

Any file can be made safer by adding more and more levels of security, but soon the security will begin to take up more and more space in the system, and will begin to interfere with normal access by working personnel. At some point, security always becomes counterproductive. Balancing security and access is an art.

Chapter Nine

„Jacen seems to have inherited his parents' gift for escaping capture.”
„As well as our gift for getting captured in the first place,” Han said.

Chapter 12

„I believe I've found the trap I've been looking for,” Ackbar said.

Chapter 22

„I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the medieval scholars and the Compulsive Anachronists, or whatever they were called, discovered that they couldn't afford their own universe without financial aid from the fantasy gamers, and that their tidy little re-creation was now going to be full of trolls and dinosaurs.”

Chapter 4

„At the moment,” said Aristide, „you help to sustain the lives of billions of humans. You keep economies efficient by tracking resources. Bits of yourself have been sent to other star systems to become the seeds of other civilizations. You've reshaped our solar system from the atoms up. Your observations of the universe have led to breakthroughs in astronomy, astrophysics, and the latest Theory of Everything.” He made a wide gesture. „So what else do you want to do?”
Bitsy stared directly ahead, her legs a blur beneath her as she matched Aristide's long strides.
„I don't know,” she said.
„There you have it,” Aristide said. „The Existential Crisis in a nutshell.”
„If I could evolve,” Bitsy said, „I might have better answers.”
„A brain the size of a planet,” said Aristide, „and you're as fucked by Sartre as the rest of us.”

Chapter 5