All right. I owe you a character. Should we buy another one?” Ross chuckled. “Now you’re getting the hang of it.” He sighed. “No, let’s see if we can… - Daniel Suarez

You might not think it, but it was always the farmers who raised hell in this country. They worked for themselves, were self-reliant, and weren’t about to take shit from anybody. But then some clever bastard figured out how to make crops inedible. My family’s been doing industrial farming for forty years and all it produces is debt, pollution, and water shortages. It ruins the land and the people on it.

Yes, space will challenge us, have no doubt, but this is the very challenge humanity needs to cure us of our propensity for bullshit — because space is where bullshit goes to die. Out there only facts and competence keep you alive. Superstition, uneducated guesses, and comforting lies are what must go extinct. Not us.

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule — meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.