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

Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.

Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents - conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don't need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.

Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!