“It was killing him, seeing her this way. She was not meant to be uncertain, timid or fearful; the woman he knew exuded confidence so fiercely it might as well be a damn spiritual aura. He needed to...”

“It felt somehow comforting to return to the sparkling lake tucked into the mountains on Portal Prime. But why, when everything about Mesme made her the antithesis of comfortable?Because here was wh...”

“Semantics, Admiral. Id appreciate an honest answer.Id appreciate a multitude of honest answers, but I rarely expect to receive them. Miriam sighed; the verbal tete-a-tete was growing tiresome. Time...”

“Evening had turned the sky a deep persimmon. The remaining sunlight enriched the colors of the ubiquitous flowers and foliage to even greater vibrancy, as if the saturation filter had been notched ...”

“A wispy murmur in the blackness. Blackness, where before there was only nothingness. It was dark, inky and thick, but there now existed the palpable sense of tangibility. She gasped in alarm, but n...”

“I believe my judgment has never been clearer. I have seen firsthand their potential, their strength of will, in a way you have not.You have loosed a chaotic, unstable variable into the Mosaic. They...”

“When artificial intelligence comes of age, the first thing it's going to do is get rid of the inefficient parts.And guess who that will be!And what will happen to us?Well, to find out the answer to...”

“The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycl...”

“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”

“We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. Were pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes.”

“We all know interspecies romance is weird.”

“Depression isn't a war you win. It's a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It's one bloody fray after another.”

“The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?""Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!""I guess that explains their rich milita...”

“Casting a curious gaze down on planet Earth, extra-terrestrial beings could well be forgiven for assuming that we humans are programmed in every move we make, by a palm-sized, oblong, slab of glass...”

“It was certainly true that I had no sense of humour in that I found nothing funny. I didnt know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific ...”