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I made a dismissive gesture with my right hand. “I’m a creature of neither culture,” I said again. “Neither graced by the naïveté of the unintentional creators, nor cursed by the terrible awareness of their creatures.

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Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve

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Humanity had become as blasé about sharing their lives with potential AI monitoring as pre-Civil War Old Earth USA-southern families had been about speaking in front of their human slaves. Nothing could be done about it—every human above the lowest Dregs’ Hive poverty class had a comlog with biomonitor, many had implants, and each of these was tuned to the music of the datasphere, monitored by elements of the datasphere, dependent upon functions of the datasphere—so humans accepted their lack of privacy.

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“Is it possible that a deity could … evolve from human consciousness like that without humanity being aware of it?

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“I taught that St. Teilhard said that it was possible,” Duré said tiredly, “but if that God is a limited being, evolving in the same way all we other limited beings have done, then no … it is not the God of Abraham and Christ.

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“The Socinian Heresy.

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“The God of machines?

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“Freeman Vanz,

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We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides.

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can’t reach the megasphere or datasphere without passing through this new thing I think of as the metasphere, and this place frightens me. It is mostly vastness and emptiness here, so different from the urban analogy landscapes of the Web’s datasphere and the biosphere analogs of the Core’s megasphere. Here it is … unsettled. Filled with strange shadows and shifting masses that have nothing to do with the Core Intelligences.

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[A lesser light asked Ummon What is the meaning of Daruma’s coming from the West> Ummon answered We see the mountains in the sun]

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In the Core high-think, what humans might call Zen, the four Nirvana virtues are (1) immutability, (2) joy, (3) personal existence, and (4) purity. Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value—existence. Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the “mountains in the sun”—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.

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[A lesser light asked Ummon Are there multiple futures> Ummon answered Does a dog have fleas