Else

“What if it’s enough to just be…”

Us, Dex knew Mosscap meant, though the robot didn’t finish.”
― Becky Chambers

“The…the worst thing about this place,” she hissed slowly, forcing the words out, “isn’t that it treats people like chattel.”

[...] “The worst part,” she whispered, breathing hard, “just the worst part, is that it tricks you.”

[...] “It makes you think you’re a thing. It makes you resign yourself to becoming a crude good. It makes things out of people so thoroughly, they…they don’t even know that they’ve become things. Even after you’re free, you don’t even know how to be free! It changes your reality, and you don’t know how to change it back!”

[...] “It’s a system,” she said. “A…device. Tevanne and the world it builds for us…it’s a machine.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside

“It was always a strange thing coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd then to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past? How could this place still be there if the you that once lived there no longer existed?”
― Becky Chambers

“Iron is iron. Stone is stone. Wood is wood. Objects have an uncomplicated sense of self, so to speak. Poeple, though, and living things... their sense of self is... complicated. Mutable. It changes. People don't think of themselves as just a bag of flehs and blood and bones, even if they basically are. They think of themselves as soldiers, as kings, as wives and husbands abd children... People can convince themselves to be anything, and because of that, the scrivings you bind them with can't stay anchored. To try to bind a person is like writing in the ocean.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside