This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.

You are. I'm just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.