When they went looking for someone to represent the agency in public and picked me, they weren’t just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were fr… - Charles Stross

Well…thanks. But I don't like to make assumptions."
"Well that's too bad, because you're running on false ones."

A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer.

Our Creators reverted to this state—they slid sideways into the cultural stasis—at a point where their population was shrinking and aging. The late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries were not good times for them: Economic deflation, ecosystem failure, wars, resource depletion, and the end of the western Enlightenment program of the natural sciences coincided poisonously with the availability of cheap slaves to serve their every need, and the near perfection of entertainment media to distract them from the wreckage of their once-beautiful world.