The greatest hope cherished by the people of Silicon Isle is to see their children leave this place, the farther the better. We’re old and can’t shift from our familiar nests, but the young are different. They’re blank sheets of paper, full of potential for new pictures.
. . .
Yes, you should go. That’s your homeland. But remember: don’t get too close. You’ll see more clearly that way.
. . .
Experience determines how far one can go in life.
. . .
But she had never imagined that her mind possessed such power to organize scattered bits of information and weave them, like silk strands extracted from disparate cocoons, into a coherent picture.
. . .
Technology addicts indulging in overdoses of dopamine have destroyed their synaptic connections and become ill with moral failings. In one experiment, the test subjects had to choose between saving a ship full of passengers by tossing a heavily wounded individual overboard, or doing nothing. All those with damaged moral-emotive brain regions chose to kill in order to save, while the normal subjects chose to do nothing. The diseased think of life as some zero-sum game in which there must be winners and losers, even at the expense of the interest of others, including their lives. This is a planetwide plague.
