Of course there were no miracles to be had, except of the modest kind permitted by the exigencies of medicine and time. - Alastair Reynolds

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.

Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.

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