It was possible at last to hear the silence—to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light. - Robert Charles Wilson

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents—conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault."
"Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first. When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you're at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.

“Even if you could talk to it, you wouldn’t learn anything. All it would tell you is what it wanted you to hear. Or no, not even what it wants you to hear; it would generate words that in some kind of model of possible outcomes produce a result that enhances the likelihood of its reproductive success.”
“I do that too,” Leo said. “From time to time.” Smiling.
“Smartass,” Cassie said.