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.

Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

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.

How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.