Katie

“Once you’ve got a task to do, it’s better to do it than to live with the fear of it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“The entire idea of it was arrogant and defiant and grandiose.
Anna loved it.
As she walked across a wide empty plain of steel that should have been covered in topsoil and crops, she thought that this audaciousness was exactly what humanity had lost somewhere in the last couple of centuries. When ancient maritime explorers had climbed into their creaking wooden ships and tried to find ways to cross the great oceans of Earth, had their voyage been any less dangerous than the one the Mormons had been planning to attempt? The end point any less mysterious? But in both cases, they’d been driven to find out what was on the other side of the long trip. Driven by a need to see shores no one else had ever seen before. Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.
A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there.
Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red