Caine has a serious flaw when it comes to working for the government. "Which is?" "Well, he has this real bad habit of telling the truth. - Charles E. Gannon

Whatever destiny we assign to ourselves also defines our doom. It is there, lurking, waiting, from the instantiation of sentience. It is the antipodal defect of the virtue we call 'foresight.'

“On the surface, it’s crazy, right?”
“It’s crazy down beyond the surface, too,” Dora affirmed.

And over the many months that followed, as Caine crept through both terrestrial and alien undergrowth on missions to reclaim some of the autonomy humanity had lost, he learned and relearned the prime lesson in common to all the shocks:
That all assumptions, like all plans, or never more than a second away from a catastrophic collision with reality.