pargery

Alternate ending for

Project Hail Mary

-- the book, I haven't seen the movie yet.

Rely on power and people will fight it.

Obliterate feelings by culture and you lose feeling. Destroy culture by feelings and you lose culture.

When culture is orderly and feelings are communicated, this is the peak of human development.

This means it is a virtue to take an overall view.

When society is orderly, the people are upright and cannot be seduced by profit. When society is disorderly, the elite are villainous and cannot be stopped by the law.

I leaned to Dimitri. "Are all Russians crazy?"

"Yes," he said with a smile. "It is the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time."

"That's dark."

"That's Russian."

In short, the human brain is a mess.

-- from Sage Leadership : Translations from the Huainanzi, Thomas Cleary

Then realizing that all SecUnits are motherless.

Consider the cruelty of creating a motherless soul via machine intelligence: Any new creature needs someone to care for it, or you start it off with a bleak world view. And where does that lead?

"Took advantage of a woman who didn't want to be took advantage of?

"Stole? Apart from lead on roofs and other stuff people wouldn't miss?

"Done any murders of anyone who didn't deserve it?"

But if you walked into the place known as Biers on a dark night and had no business there, who would ever know?

For the vampires.., it was a place to hang up. For the werewolves, it was where you let your hair down. For the bogey men, it was a place to come out of the closet. For the ghouls, it did a decent meat pasty and chips.

Oh no, wait -- I could use my eyes.