Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.
“I’m not going to risk the entire galaxy in order to save a friend I’ve already grieved over.”
“You do know that this time around you can’t pretend innocence. You can prevent Tagon’s death, so if he dies, it’s all on your furry little head.”
“And if the galaxy dies, nobody will care.”
“If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, I’ve got a room full of violence-prone semi-sociopaths who care.”
“Let’s discuss this in private, shall we?”
Why had he done it? Why couldn’t it just not have happened? Why didn’t they have time-travel, why couldn’t he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn’t able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision…
“I want to go back to four weeks ago and take away Tony’s Flexy.” He meant it, of course. Doctor Stuart had worked hard to get Mike to say those words. If he was thinking in terms of sibling rivalries and guilt feelings, it didn’t show. “You can’t do that, Mike. Time is a one-way street with no parking spaces. You just have to keep going.” “Until you have an accident,” Mike said bitterly. Doctor Stuart nodded. “Or run out of gas,” he added, because he himself was old enough for the analogy to apply.
Knowing the future is a huge responsibility. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
‘I’ve got fivesight,’ he told me. ‘Something just a little bit better than foresight.’
The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year’s price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.
The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man.
But it’s lovely work if you can stomach it.
You can not aspire for redemption by asking for your reputation back. Redemption requires action, and a reputation is either defended or it is earned.
To oppose something is to maintain it.
They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk in a different road.
Laika says I’m not middle of the road. One time she said that I was the road. She said I was her post-apocalyptic highway.
My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos… ruined dreams… this wasted land. But most of all, I remember The Road Warrior. The man we called “Max.”
But if you erase my memories, how will I learn from my mistakes?
Only one attack fully succeeded, even so, but it was the one upon which he’d lavished the most care and effort, and he wasn’t taking any chances on simply erasing the data he was after. Oh, no. His attack came equipped with the specific security codes for the computers in question, triggering the command sequence which reformatted their molecular circuitry itself. Turned those computers’ memories into solid, inert chunks of crystalline alloy from which Saint Peter himself could not have recovered one single scrap of data. And because the man who’d prepared that attack came from so high inside Security itself, he’d known where all the backups were maintained . . . and how to reach them, too.
“Brash souls made jokes about what must be mountains of unread spy-eye data stored who knew where and how.”
You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.
Our instruments cannot perceive the wathan, what you call the soul, when its owner has died after attaining a certain stage of… let’s call it goodness instead of ethical advancement
“I’ve never done a funeral for an artificial intelligence before.”
“We figured as much.”
“Oh?”
“I think the “Petey’s not in hell for committing suicide because he had no soul to begin with” argument gave you away.”
“You’re not eulogizing me when I die, even if it means I have to take you with me to make sure.”
“Have at you, Builders! You can’t keep a science-fiction writer in Hell!”
“He runs something called the Celestial People’s Republic, just north of here. What he tells his subjects is that we can turn Hell into Heaven by collectivizing it.”