James S.A. Corey

Tilly screamed. Anna__ shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of avoiding the horror in front of her, but only in a distant and dreamy sort of way.

God save us all from good-looking men.

Partners,_ she said, and fired two rounds into his head.

The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous.

His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars.

The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.

I don__ kill children,_ she said. __ot even when it__ the right thing to do.

The sex,_ he said. __ just wanted to make sure that we were okay. That things were all right between us.___ell,_ she said, __rgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I__ probably more fond of you than before.

And somehow, that changed everything about sex. The movements might all be the same, but the desire to communicate affection rather than demonstrate prowess changed what everything meant.

Every empire grow until its reach exceeds its grasp

It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach.

It was some of Solomon__ favorite music because it was dense and intellectually complicated and he wasn__ expected to dance to it.

That__ what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn__ matter.

The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.

All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it was part of seemed to apply everywhere and maybe always.

No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.

Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.

Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he__ ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.