Ah, the good old days,” I replied. “When things were simpler, kids were more respectful, and we had to walk to school through six feet of snow.” “Bar… - Dennis E. Taylor

Well, I kind of am doing exactly that, colonel. Project planning isn’t about avoiding changes, it’s about controlling them. No project plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Was I alive? Hmm, since no one had yet managed to define life rigorously, that was going to be a fun one. As the speaker at that long-ago panel in Vegas had pointed out, fire has most of the qualities of life but is not alive. According to Dr. Landers, I would be able to reproduce via printer-based autofactories. I certainly responded to stimuli, and acted with self-interest. The claim that life would have to be carbon-based was chauvinistic and narrow-minded, so yeah, I could consider myself alive.

Guppy somehow managed to look disappointed, although if pressed, I couldn’t for the life of me describe what a disappointed fish looked like.