epochs

“Misery was a creeping thing, like the dew settling on grass or the cold fingers of frost meeting me in my bed at night and crackling the insides of my windows. I had longed to be left alone, to escape the lie of my family, only to discover this was different kind of poison. Slow acting, but lethal. At first it numbed me, pleasure leaching from my days like a summer leaf draining of sap to greet the autumn. Then loneliness came, a creeping oily stain that stopped me from enjoying it at all.”
― Kat Dunn, Bitterthorn

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“My friend is not a diplomat. She is the failure of diplomacy. She is the breakdown of negotiations. There is no escalation of hostilities beyond her.”
― F.C. Yee, The Shadow of Kyoshi

“I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War