For this to work, a million things have to go right. For it to fall apart, just one of them has to go wrong. - James S. A. Corey

The woman herself looked down at hem from where she was etched in stone. It was probably just his imagination, but she seemed amused. Like now that she was dead and not actually responsible for fixing any of the vast and secret shit show that was human history, she finally got the joke.

All the numberless different solutions that evolution had come up with under all the different stars, and all responding—more or less—to the same pressures. Eyes on every world. Mouths near the sense organs, because things with feeding coordination did better than things without.

I hope we don’t start shooting, but what I hope will happen and what actually happens are almost never the same.