Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere. - Robert Charles Wilson

Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

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.