"You ever needed to disprove the existence of a Creator God," he said, "the miracle of efficiency that the human body isn't would be a fucking good p… - Elizabeth Bear

Kusanagi-Jones was long past feeling guilt about lying. Conscience was one of the first things to go. If he’d ever had much of one to begin with, the job had burned it out.

"Cultural hegemony is based on conformity," he said, after a pause long enough that she had expected to go unanswered. "Siege mentality. Look at oppressed philosophies, religions—or religions that cast themselves as oppressed to encourage that kind of defensiveness. Logic has no pull. What the lizard brain wants, the monkey brain justifies, and when things are scary, anything different is the enemy. Can come up with a hundred pseudological reasons why, but they all boil down to one thing: if you aren't one of us, you're one of them."

The old have nothing to pace themselves for, she’d say. This is the final sprint. Run. Run. See how far you can get before you fall.