"There's nothing down there at all," he said, finally. "Nothing that thinks. I never liked it down there, it's all just... raw instinct, at the center. Left over from way back when the limbic system was the brain. Only now it's just unskilled labour, right? Just one small part of the whole, to do all that petty autonomic shit the upstart neocortex can't be bothered with."

"You die from the outside in, did you know that?" he said, when the silence hurt more than the words. "And then, just for a moment, the center is all you are again. And down there, nobody wants to... you know, even the suicides, they were just fooling themselves. Intellectual games. We're so fucking proud of thinking ourselves to death that we've forgotten all about the old reptilian part of the brain sleeping inside, the part that doesn't calculate ethics or quality of life or burdens on the next of kin, it just wants to live, that's all it's programmed for, you know? And at the very end, when we aren't around to keep it in line any more, it comes up and looks around and at that last moment it knows it's been betrayed, and it... screams."

"Something waking up in the core of ourselves, after a hundred million years for that one last moment, scared to death."

/Flesh Made Word, P. Watts/