There’s nothing like a stupid, accidental death to remind you of the supreme futility of everything. - Alastair Reynolds

All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?" "I'm never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn't in my nature.

All her concerns, all her fears, began to feel trifling. It was just a trick of perspective, really, seeing things as they truly were.

Auger could not help marvelling at the experience of being inside the ALS sphere and seeing her world as it should have been. This was an earth that had never known nuclear war, or runaway climatic catastrophe, or smart weather, or a Nanocaust. The sight of it made her want to weep. No image had ever come close to the heartbreaking beauty of this small blue world, a beauty all the more acute now that she knew how exquisitely fragile it was. It was the beauty of a butterfly’s wing.