I have come to kill you."The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try.

I say, let's learn more and then speculate.

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.

The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.

And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.