And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.

It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.