“Yes-yes!” Jon bounces up and down on the balls of her feet. “How much coffee did we have this morning?” Pete asks, suspicion dawning. “All of it!” B… - Charles Stross

Bet you he’s a smart sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat and no knickers—and willing to shed blood without a second thought if it’s to defend his position.

But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we’ll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that’s what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don’t we?

There's a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. But even though their eschatology is insane, it doesn't necessarily follow that they're trying to summon up the elder gods."