It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen. - Robert Charles Wilson

I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

There was no mind in back of those words, Ethan reminded himself. Nothing but a series of highly-evolved algorithms aimed as achieving a strategic result. Engaging in dialogue with such a creature was no more useful than trying to fend off a scorpion by quoting Voltaire.

Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.