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411 pages, Hardcover
First published February 25, 2020
“As the author, I construct an artifact out of words, but the words are meaningless until they're animated by the consciousness of the reader. The story is co-told by the author and the reader, and every story is incomplete until a reader comes a long and interprets it."
"She would show them how she now understood that digging into the past was an act of comprehension, an act of making sense of the universe."
"A war opened a door in men, and whatever was inside just tumbled out. The entropy of the world increased, in the absence of a demon by the door."
“You cannot tell which memories are real and which memories are false, and yet you insist on their importance, base so much of your life on them.”
“What did I think was going to happen? After decades of watching the exact same script being followed to end in thoughts and prayers, what made me think this time would be different? It was the very definition of madness.”
“A VR rig was the ultimate empathy machine. How could she truly say she had walked in their shoes without suffering as they did?”
“But the digital world, the world of bits and electrons, of words and images—it had brought her so much joy, felt so intimate that she thought of it a part of her. And it hurt.”
“She taught me that our mortality makes us human. The limited time given to each of us makes what we do meaningful. We die to make place for our children, and through our children a piece of us lives on, the only form of immortality that is real.”
"I was right about you; a real artist will do whatever it takes to make a great vision come true, even if she has to work with someone else's art."
"They could use a historian," she said. "Someone who knew something about how things used to work."
”It's not how long we have that matters, but what we do with the same time we have.”
"We have grown to the point where we must depend on machines to survive," said Mom. "The world has become too fragile for us to count on people, and so our only choice is to make it even more fragile."
"Humanity may have taken to the stars, but we have destroyed our home planet. Such has been the lament of the Naturalists for eons."
"Greed and ambition are the rule at court, and the only goal of every governor, general, official, and legate, Revealed or not, is selfish gain, not the good of the people."
"There's a greater promise we all must live by: to do what our heart tells us is right."
"There is a darkness in human nature that makes certain conflicts irreconcilable."
"This was a story that would always mean something, a message worth passing on, even in a universe that was cold, dark, and dying."
"The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil."