I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through t… - Alastair Reynolds

I can't tell you how much happier I'd be meeting a bunch of artificial intelligences if I also happened to have one on my side." "Can we drop the 'artificial intelligence'? It's a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.

A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.
It was something she was proud to be part of.

I felt a terrible sadness open inside me, a void through which the winds from the end of the universe were blowing.