He checked her over while mentally checking himself. “Environment suits sealed up. Breather masks in hand. Daemons. Blades. Transmitters. Healthy respect for the adversary—you’ve got that, right?” One corner of her mouth curled up. “Absolutely.

— G.S. Jennsen

Her perception was propelled backward, as if it were being pulled into a vortex. She slammed into her body, and her eyes flew open with a gasp.“Alex?” She sat straight up in the chair and grabbed Caleb by the shoulders. “We have to save them.

— G.S. Jennsen

He wasn’t going to be able to deactivate the field, which meant there was only one choice. He’d realized early on that his arcane, profoundly alien passenger came with a cost, possibly one too high to pay and get out the other side free and clear. Furthermore, he’d pay it nonetheless and without complaint if the death would only come through for him now. Caleb closed his eyes.

— G.S. Jennsen

His vision blurred, his grip on the dash faltered, and the cockpit lost definition. Then all the death rushed back to him in its own shockwave. The physical force slammed him against the cockpit half-wall. He gasped air into his lungs as a crimson aura throbbed above his skin. The world spun around him, and it occurred to him if he wanted to he could control it—not the spinning, but the world.

— G.S. Jennsen

How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn't think he would have the right answer. But after today's mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.

— Annalee Newitz

Humans, after all, weren’t actively hostile toward most of the species we’d made extinct over the millennia of our ascendance; they simply weren’t part of our design. The same could turn out to be true of superintelligent machines, which would stand in a similar kind of relationship to us as we ourselves did to the animals we bred for food, or the ones who fared little better for all that they had no direct dealings with us at all.

— Mark O'Connell

I believe my judgment has never been clearer. I have seen firsthand their potential, their strength of will, in a way you have not.”“You have loosed a chaotic, unstable variable into the Mosaic. They will destroy everything.”“It is a risk. They also may save everything.

— G.S. Jennsen

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

— Alan Turing

I frankly expected a far more negative reaction from you on discovering…” she glanced around the lab “…the situation. Why are you helping?”“I’m not helping—I’m merely not hindering in as strenuous a fashion as I am able.

— G.S. Jennsen

If there was anything the last year had taught her—if there was anything Caleb had taught her, the Antigen War had taught her—it was that perspective was everything. If you wanted to understand your enemy, you must understand that they were the hero in their own story.

— G.S. Jennsen