We're flexible," Campion said. "It's the price we pay for being sentient. - Alastair Reynolds

The one thing I never counted on was having luck on my side.
It was generally simpler that way.

We're pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we've even got machines in the Oort cloud. That's where it gets stickier. If we're going to do anything useful out there, we'll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers." "You're not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago," Geoffrey said. "Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It's going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.

I wish there was something we could do. But organised structure is the most precious thing in the universe. When it is lost, it is truly lost.