I could offer considerable inducements. I can arrange for a new mate who is, in all meaningful measures, superior to the one you are currently pursui… - Charles E. Gannon

If, fourteen years ago, he had entertained secret hopes of leaving a discernible, enduring mark on the legacy of humankind, he was now fully disabused of them.

Worse yet, he still had to remind himself that sensations—such as tonight’s skin-cooling sea breeze—were just a blizzard of electric impulses, tricking his brain, his nerves.
Which, he had begun to fear, might not just be the endgame for Dornaani civilization. It could be in humanity’s future as well. Conceivably, those seeds were latent in electricity itself. Given how it ultimately expanded each individual’s sphere of contact and control, its utility was inseparable from the allure of its power. We summon heat and light without having to create it ourselves. We communicate across continents and oceans. We operate machines that labor in our stead. We keep opponents at a safe distance with remote sensors and drones. Is that how the long, subtle slide into speciate senescence began, that the more a species distanced itself from direct action, the more unfamiliar the natural environment became?

Would anyone, even low-breeds, be so ingenuous to believe such a tale?
"Remarkably, yes. Their power to believe what they wish, if not given incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, is rather astonishing.