Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker." "I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents. - Iain Banks

Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza.
"Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival.

We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.

By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.