“We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It’s all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, a brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder.”

— Iain Banks

“Descendant” (pp. 47-48)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

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Iain Banks 139

Scottish writer 1954–2013

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