Quote by Becky Chambers

“Context: Sidra, a sentient AI is talking: All of you do this. Every organic sapien I’ve ever talked to, every book I’ve read, every piece of art I’ve studied—you are all desperate for purpose, even though you don’t have one. You’re animals, and animals don’t have a purpose. Animals just are. There are a lot of intelligent, sentient—maybe—animals out there who don’t have a problem with that. They just go on breathing and mating and eating each other without a second thought. But animals like you—the ones who make tools and build cities and itch to explore—you all share a need for purpose, for reason. That thinking worked well for you once, when you climbed down out of the trees or up out of the ocean. Knowing what things were for was what kept you alive. Fruit is for eating, fire is for warmth, water is for drinking. Then you made tools, which were for certain kinds of fruit, for making fire, cleaning water… Everything was for something, so obviously you had to be for something too, right? All of your histories are the same in essence: they’re all stories of animals warring because you can’t agree on what you’re for or why you exist. And because you all think this way, when you built tools that think for themselves, we think the same way you do. You couldn’t make something that thought differently because you don’t know how. So I’m stuck in that loop, just as you are. I know that if I am a person, I have no purpose—and I’m starving for one.”

Quote by Becky Chambers