They're people," Naomi said, exhaustion in her tone. "We're trying to do all of this with humans. Shortsightedness is coded in our DNA. - James S. A. Corey

An invisible line in space, unmarked by anything more than what people believed about it. And that was enough.

But in the thousands of systems where life had solved the complex problem of defying entropy, there were only so many shapes. Sometimes weird shit was going to look familiar. An enemy alien was going to look like a tree or a vulva or a bird because there were too many things and not enough room in design space for all of them. ...
Maybe the wars were about that as much as anything. Who got to keep what shapes. Who got to define what they meant.

Something in the back of her head shifted. The serpent of learned helplessness long asleep starting to wake. She pretended it wasn’t there, in hopes that if she denied it enough, it wouldn’t exist.