The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

Sometimes, even the very best course of action fails.

What about an amnesiac, who awakes having lost his memories and must learn of his past from scratch? Has he died? How can we be just memories? How does that leave us with enough?

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

In the end, living is defined by dying.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world...

Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect. As I have already said, religious fundamentalism was on the rise, but that is not the type of superstition I am referring to. The superstition that held sway at the time was a belief in simple causes. Even the plainest...

… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

But time passes. Fear becomes a memory. Terror becomes routine; it loses its grip.

I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have...