Daniel Suarez

But you have a problem: Because I’m dead, you can’t arrest me. More importantly: You can’t stop me.

I have always held a deep admiration for the founding fathers of your republic. Your Constitution and your Bill of Rights were an incredible gift to mankind. Although lately America appears to have strayed from the path set forth by its founders.

No, it’s better than alchemy — it’s science.

What you see around you is the result of thousands upon thousands of years of human experience. Knowledge and wisdom passed down to us from all our ancestors. And while the crisis back on Earth may be human-made, the story of life is the story of crises. Of facing them. Adapting and surviving. There have always been blights and pestilences that challenged our forebears. It now falls to us to use the knowledge they bequeathed us, to find a path to flourishing.” She gazed at the lush plants. “Here we have begun the process of learning how to build from scratch the biosphere from which we evolved — to build, beyond Earth, environments consisting of hundreds of thousands of interacting species — bacteria, fungi, invertebrates, plants, mammals, fish, birds, and more. This will be the key to safeguarding Earth’s legacy, of which humanity is just one small part.

So what? So what if everyone cares? What does that do for us? The situation we’re in isn’t going to be solved by angry posts and best fucking wishes. Public outrage has never stopped these bastards.

When I realized what our world had become, how humanity had become cogs in its own machine, I resolved to do something terrible . . . perhaps one of the worse things ever done. To exploit the automation of our world in order to plant the seed of a new system is reckless and irresponsible. But I didn’t see any other way we would change. Or could change. “But

no society with a wide power imbalance remains free for very long.

Just look at corn and soybeans, subsidized with taxpayer money — creating a market that wouldn’t otherwise make sense. Why? So agribusiness firms have cheap inputs to make processed food. The taxpayers are basically subsidizing corporations to make crap, when we could have grown real food on our own.

They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

For the first time she started understanding the appeal the Daemon must hold to a broad cross-section of people. It was a chance to start over. Daemon operatives had said it provided medical care. Retirement. Debt relief. No wonder. It was essentially a tax on corporations — one the corporate attorneys couldn’t dodge by moving their headquarters to Bermuda.

I’ve always been your friend, Alexa. Now go. I will try to kill you as unsuccessfully as I can.

When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.

"Watching it, he realized for the first time that the world had really changed — that a line was being drawn in society and which side of the line you stood on would determine your future. He realized more than ever that technological prowess had become a survival skill. "It’s getting bad, isn’t it?" "That

If you ask me, this is simple: we shut everything off and go back to using pens, paper, and phones. Lay off all these IT bastards.