I'll survive," Floyd said. "I'm a private detective. If I don't get clouted on the head at least once a week, I'm not doing my job properly. - Alastair Reynolds

It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure.

Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.

Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time.