Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone’s problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor.

A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody’s life.

I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings.

It’s raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight?

All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all.

This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, or the fifth or the tenth. I guess it’s time to think of it as your life.

I’m cold and free and the smartest man in the world, and this time they’re going to know it, I promise you. I promise you that.

I miss the girl I was, and I wish I could tell her that. But she got hurt really bad and I’ve been waiting such a long time for her to be okay again. I bet she never dreamed she would live so long, or do the things she can do now. I wish I could tell her what she’d grow up to be, how strange and beautiful and unexpected she’d be. She’d probably feel a lot better if she knew. The sky and the stars are brilliant, and I think of how much she would have loved this.

Lisa had an engineer’s way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.

I won but I wasn’t like Pat. Because – and why this should be I’ll never know – I never did a thing that wasn’t somehow touched with selfish, furtive hunger, with a private, annihilating need for recognition. Because I’m like a child in a fairy tale cursed from birth, and there has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn’t turn spoiled and ridiculous. Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in.