Some people get it. Most people never will. But that’s art. - Alastair Reynolds

Goma shook her head. “No. We don’t speak of souls. Not now, not ever. Souls aren’t real.”
“Patterns, then. Abstract structures of experience and reaction, making up a consistent, continuous human identity.”

This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate.

She rapped on for a while about how the nineties milieu was best addressed as a system of infections: sexual illnesses, rogue advertising slogans, computer viruses, proliferating junk mail…the kind of jive that had spread into all the glossy style magazines, as if, she mused, the viral paradigm was a metavirus in its own right.