Status Updates From The Colonel (Firefall, #1.5)

He stands there, weighing costs, weighing risks. The threat of greater gods, the hazards of beatific indifference. The threat posed by aliens from another world; the threat posed by aliens from this one. The delusional arrogance in the thought that some puny caveman, scarcely climbed down from the trees, might be able to use one against the other.

It’s the ultimate business model: Give us your brain to run our machinery and we’ll keep its conscious left-overs entertained.

He used to go to Heaven once a week. Then once a month. Now it’s been over a year.
There just hasn’t seemed to be any point.

“Because no matter how much you disapprove of their lifestyle, eight million happily-catatonic souls aren’t any kind of military threat.”
“You sure about that? Can you even begin to imagine what kind of plans could be brewing in a coherent thinking entity with the mass of eight million human brains?”

“Except the Interface Act passed a good ten years ago and they still haven’t got their definition right. How could they? Brains rewire themselves every time we have an idle thought; how do you outlaw cortical editing without outlawing life at the same time?”

His son’s candle slumbers in its own little corner of his network, a pilot light in purgatory.

“We climbed this hill,” she says now, to the attentive host of In Conversation. “Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now.”

Coalescence.
That far-focus moment, that thousand-soul stare.

One of the few good things about the decimation of Ecuador’s wildlife: not much chance, these days, of mistaking a guerrilla for a jaguar.

What must it be like to be given godsight only to have it snatched away again, to have your miserable baseline existence plagued by muddy, incomprehensible half-memories of the sublime? No wonder people get addicted. No wonder some have to be ripped screaming from their sockets.