<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> This is the fourth book in <cite>The Expanse</cite> series. It follows the <cite>Rocinante</cite> to a planet called <cite>Ilus</cite> (colonists) or <cite>New Terra</cite> (U.N.). The Roci is sent there by Avasarala and Fred Johnson to settle the dispute between colonists and the official science and security team sent by the U.N. Basia Merton is a colonist, there with his wife Lucia, the colony's doctor and their daughter Felcia. The colonists are mainly Belters, who arrived on the <cite>Barbapiccola</cite>. They'd managed to convert their bodies to be compatible with living on a planet and have started mining the planet's lithium. They think that they can stand on the law of "first come, first served," but the U.N. is going to land and take everything away from them, claiming their right based on decisions and laws made in a complete other star system. <bq caption="Page 117">Somewhere out near the ring gates, the radio signals had passed each other, waves of electromagnetism passing through the void with human meanings coded into them. The distance it had taken a year and a half to travel in person, the message had managed in five hours. Five hours, and still too goddamn slow.</bq> There are colonists who are unhappy enough with this situation to want to disable the landing pad. Basia is one of them. However, just as they've set up the charges and primed them, they hear that the shuttle from the U.N. ship <cite>Edward Israel</cite> is coming early. The explosives go off just as the shuttle is trying to land and it crashes, killing most of the passengers. Exozoologist Elvi Okoye is on the shuttle and survives the crash, as does geohydraulicist Fayez Sarkis. Soon after, the dangerous and deadly security chief Murtry comes down to the surface. After the colonists kill most of the remaining RCE security personnel, Murtry is in his element. He's ready to whip the colonists off of the planet and will feel justified in doing so by any means necessary. He will, in fact, enjoy doing so immensely. Murtry engineers more and more control for himself, eventually even getting his second-in-command Havelock (Miller's former partner) to take over the<cite>Edward Israel</cite> from its captain. Down the well, Murtry starts eliminating suspected conspirators. On the Rocinante, Holden is still dealing with visions of Miller, who's been able to maintain a connection to him because there's still a chunk of protomolecule stuck in one of the Roci's cargo holds. Miller is a piece of advanced software, with no other purpose than to act as an "investigator" for its master, also a piece of sophisticated software that has purpose, of a sort, but no intelligence. It works on instinct, on rules that apply to situations. It cannot do anything but the thing that it must do. The book described this mindless, vast intelligence that runs Miller's simulation as "reaching out", seeking that which it seeks, <bq caption="Page 41">One imagines an insect’s leg twitching twitching twitching. One hears a spark closing a gap, the ticking so fast it becomes a drone. Another, oblivious, reexperiences her flesh falling from her bones, the nausea and fear, and begs for death as she has for years now. Her name is Maria. It does not let her die. It does not comfort her. It is unaware of her because it is unaware. But unaware is not inactive. It finds power where it can, nestled in a bath of low radiation. Tiny structures, smaller than atoms, harvest the energy of the fast-moving particles that pass through it. Subatomic windmills. It eats the void and it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out.</bq> It has no opinion on whether it will find that which it seeks. It doesn't matter either way. It can only be the way that it is. It does not pain it to keep going. It does not fear the end of its mission. It is instinct, the twitching of an insect's leg. Miller is an extension of it. <bq caption="Page 42">If there had been a reply, it could end. If there had been anyone to answer, it would have come to rest like a marble at the bottom of a hill, but nothing answers. The scars know that no answer will ever come, but the reflex triggers the reflex triggers the reflex and it reaches out. It has solved a billion small puzzles already in cascades of reflex. It has no memory of having done so, except in its scars. There is only reaching out, delivering the message that its task is complete. Nothing answers, and so it cannot end. It reaches out. It is a complex mechanism for solving puzzles using what there is to be used.</bq> <bq caption="Page 43">It will not stop until it makes that final connection, and it will never make that final connection. It stretches, tries new combinations, different ways to reach out, unaware that it is doing so. Unaware that it exists. Empty, except in the insignificant parts. The insectile leg will twitch forever. The scar that wails for death will wail forever. The investigator will search forever. The low voice will mutter forever.</bq> Although, maybe there is something like "feelings", perhaps it can feel the difference between success and failure. How could it be otherwise? Even in a machine, there has to be something that makes it choose between a path that takes it further from accomplishing its mission and one that takes it closer. Maybe there is no better way to describe those incentives as "inspiring hope" or "being happy". Positive feedback that encourages a particular direction. There is no need to avoid familiar formulations because they're as appropriate as anything else. There is no downside to anthropomorphism if it helps describe what's going on. <bq caption="Page 131">It touches something, and for a moment, a part of it that can feel, feels hope. It is unaware of hope. The reply does not come. It is not over. It will never be over. It reaches out, and finds new things. Old things. It flows into places that are comfortable for it to flow. There are responses, and the responses feed the impulses that caused them, and there are more responses. All automatic and empty and dead as it is. Nothing reaches back. It feels no disappointment. It does not shut down. It reaches out.</bq> The Roci delivers Holden and Amos on the planet, with Alex and Naomi clearing out soon after and taking up station in orbit. Holden tries to ingratiate himself with both sides, as a negotiator. Amos squares off against Murtry. <bq caption="Page 128">“I know who you are,” Amos said. The big man had been so quiet that both Murtry and Holden started with surprise. “Who am I?” Murtry asked, playing along. “A killer,” Amos said. His face was expressionless, his tone light. “You’ve got a nifty excuse and the shiny badge to make you seem right, but that’s not what this is about. You got off on smoking that guy in front of everyone. You can’t wait to do it again.” “Is that right?” Murtry asked. “Yeah. So, one killer to another, you don’t want to try that shit with us.” “Amos, easy,” Holden warned, but the other two men ignored him. “That sounded like a threat,” Murtry said. “Oh, it really was,” Amos replied with a grin. Holden realized both men had their hands below the table. “Hey, now.” “I think maybe one of us is going to end bloody,” Murtry said. “How about now?” Amos replied with a shrug. “I’m free now. We can just skip all the middle part.”</bq> Holden engineers a compromise of sorts, allowing the colonists to continue processing lithium, but also not allowing the <cite>Barbapiccola</cite> to leave orbit. They will soon have other problems. Meanwhile, Miller and the protomolecule's presence has begun waking up the many protomolecule-civilization's artifacts that lie scattered around the planet. Holden knows that this is no longer a planet on which they should try to live, but no-one wants to listen to reason and leave---neither the colonists nor the RCE. Basia is taken prisoner on board the Roci, where he is given free rein. His daughter Felcia is uploaded to the <cite>Barbapiccola</cite>. Naomi is taken prisoner by Havelock while on an EVA to disable something on the <cite>Edward Israel</cite>. The planet continues to wake up. One of the moons melts. There are microorganisms in the air that take up residence in people's eyes and slowly start to blind everyone. The poison slugs aren't far behind. They'll follow the world-spanning tidal wave that forces everyone to take cover in one of the alien artifacts. Also, the artifacts have dampened fusion, so the ships in orbit are on battery power---and the <cite>Barbapiccola</cite> is in a degrading orbit. Things are going downhill. On the surface, they all pull together to block off access to the poison slugs and to keep the water out. This, despite everyone but Holden going blind. He ends up doing most of the defense work, thanklessly, of course. Holden is protected by the anti-cancer meds he's been taken since the <cite>Eros</cite> incident. With a cure for people's blindness underway, Holden takes off with Miller on a mission to find an ... empty place in the protomolecule network, a place where the protomolecule can't go. It turns out to be their first encounter with a "bullet", an otherdimensional and non-local "weapon" left behind by the civilization that eliminated the protomolecule civilization. <bq caption="Page 602">It was hard to look at directly. The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous. And within that boundary, darkness swirled. It was more than an absence. She could sense a structure within it, layers interpenetrating, like shadows casting shadows. It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it.</bq> Murtry and Wei head off after Holden, tracking his position, but following in a cart instead of using the bizarre alien tube transport that Holden used. Amos and Elvi head out after them in another cart. Meanwhile, in orbit, everyone is working on saving the <cite>Barbapiccola</cite> with a tether, a ton of ingenuity and no small amount of annoying personal drama and utterly depraved risk assessment (saving Felchia being deemed more important than losing both ships). Havelock is on the Roci, having released Naomi and accompanied her and Basia back there. Havelock's security team gets too big for their britches and launches an attack, but they're woefully underprepared and their attack fails. The crews of the <cite>Edward Israel</cite> and the <cite>Roci</cite> manage to rescue the <cite>Barbapiccola's</cite> holds, but the ship burns up in the atmosphere. Back on the surface, Amos kills Wei, Murtry shoots Amos, Amos shoots Murtry, Fayez punches Murtry, Murtry shoots Fayez, Elvi runs off after Holden. Holden leaves her with Miller---embodied in a worker drone---to kill the "bullet" while he deals with Murtry, whom he shoots a few more times, but leaves alive. Elvi and Miller fight against the bullet to subdue it and eventually manage to "shut it off", but not before Elvi falls through it with Miller. Miller becomes the whole planet for a tiny while, but then, with his mission finally accomplished, he ... disappears. Elvi loses ... time. She survives, but doesn't know what to make of her experience. <bq caption="Page 621">He connects, and the investigator becomes the world. He feels it everywhere. The orbital bases, the power cores in the crushing depth of the ocean, the library vaults where the old ones had lived, the signaling stations high in the mountains, the cities deep beneath the ground. He is the world.</bq> Fusion is back; the ships are back on full power. The <cite>Roci</cite> descends to the surface again to pick everyone up and get Amos into the autodoc. Murtry is also on board, as a prisoner. Holden and his crew, instead of failing---kind of as Avasarala and Johnson had hoped---have proven to the rest of the galaxy that colonization <i>does</i> work. Mars begins to empty out, as many of its colonists will give up on terraforming a planet when there a thousand with real atmospheres to choose from. The balance in Sol System has been disrupted. <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 6">“Mars,” her brother said, “is the most studied planet there is. It doesn’t matter how many new datasets you get that aren’t about Mars. They aren’t about Mars! It’s like saying that seeing pictures of a thousand other tables will tell you about the one you’re already sitting at.”</bq> It's An interesting argument. You already have more than enough to do here. Why go somewhere else? On the other hand, you can extrapolate solutions from lessons learned in other similar situations. <bq caption="Page 6">“The contract with the shipyards came through. It should help us place a lot of vets in new jobs.” “Because they’re building exploration ships and transports,” her nephew said. “David.” “Sorry, Mom. But they are,” David replied, not backing down.</bq> <bq caption="Page 6">Because he doesn't question whether it's a good thing. All change is good if you're dissatisfied.</bq> <bq caption="Page 28">She didn’t recognize their faces or the way their bodies moved. After a year and a half on the Israel, she knew everyone on sight, and these were strangers. The locals, then. The squatters. Illegals. The air smelled like burning dust and cumin.</bq> It's good to show that humans would of course impose a quasi-legal framework to transform that which others claim to be their own property, always through alienation, which works so well. Sharing is out of the question. Meins. <bq caption="Page 34">The supplies on the heavy shuttle—and the heavy shuttle itself—were gone. And the quiet that came over the Edward Israel was like the moment of shock between the impact of a blow and the pain. And then the rage and the grief. Not only the crew’s. Havelock’s too.</bq> They never thought of themselves as invaders, conquerors. The people on the planet were there, but had no significance. Theirs claims not worth considering or even knowing about. That they would strike to protect their claim unthinkable <bq caption="Page 37">They’re scientists. They looked on the squatters as an annoyance and a threat to their data. For most of them, this is outside their experience.”</bq> Wonderful use of the slur to emphasize who's right and who's wrong. <bq caption="Page 39">“So mostly they hate Earthers,” Murtry said. “That’s what pulls them together. That thing where they’re oppressed by Earth is just about the one thing they have in common. So they cultivate it. Hating people like us is what makes them them.” Murtry nodded. “You know there are people that would call you prejudiced for saying that.” “It’s only prejudice when you haven’t been there,” Havelock said. “I was on Ceres Station just before it broke for the OPA. For me, it’s all lived experience.” “Well, I think you’re right,” Murtry said.</bq> Very nicely expressed lowbrow estimation of an enemy. Their hatred is unkennable, so you don't have to bother even looking for reason. Just kill them before they kill you. <bq caption="Page 40">“But we have the charter. We have a right to be here.”</bq> Don't you always. Doesn't the empire/occupier always make sure to dot its i's and cross its t's. <bq caption="Page 41">One imagines an insect’s leg twitching twitching twitching. One hears a spark closing a gap, the ticking so fast it becomes a drone. Another, oblivious, reexperiences her flesh falling from her bones, the nausea and fear, and begs for death as she has for years now. Her name is Maria. It does not let her die. It does not comfort her. It is unaware of her because it is unaware. But unaware is not inactive. It finds power where it can, nestled in a bath of low radiation. Tiny structures, smaller than atoms, harvest the energy of the fast-moving particles that pass through it. Subatomic windmills. It eats the void and it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out.</bq> <bq caption="Page 42">If there had been a reply, it could end. If there had been anyone to answer, it would have come to rest like a marble at the bottom of a hill, but nothing answers. The scars know that no answer will ever come, but the reflex triggers the reflex triggers the reflex and it reaches out. It has solved a billion small puzzles already in cascades of reflex. It has no memory of having done so, except in its scars. There is only reaching out, delivering the message that its task is complete. Nothing answers, and so it cannot end. It reaches out. It is a complex mechanism for solving puzzles using what there is to be used.</bq> <bq caption="Page 43">It will not stop until it makes that final connection, and it will never make that final connection. It stretches, tries new combinations, different ways to reach out, unaware that it is doing so. Unaware that it exists. Empty, except in the insignificant parts. The insectile leg will twitch forever. The scar that wails for death will wail forever. The investigator will search forever. The low voice will mutter forever.</bq> <bq caption="Page 64">Now their conversations were so careful, it was like the words all had glass bones. So he changed the topic.</bq> <bq caption="Page 70">“You know what I love about this planet?” Fayez said instead of hello. “Nothing?” He scowled at her, feigning hurt feelings. “I love the period of rotation. Thirty hours. You can get in a full day’s work, stay up getting drunk at the saloon, and still get a full night’s sleep. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this back home.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 90">“That’s speculation,” Elvi said. “Nothing in the fossil record indicates that there was more than the one beginning of life on Earth. We don’t get to just make things up because they sound good.” “Elvi is very comfortable with mysteries,” Fayez said to Felcia with a wink. “It’s why she has a hard time relating with those of us who feel anxious with our ignorance.” “Well, you can’t know everything,” Elvi said, making it a joke to hide a tinge of discomfort.</bq> <bq caption="Page 117">Somewhere out near the ring gates, the radio signals had passed each other, waves of electromagnetism passing through the void with human meanings coded into them. The distance it had taken a year and a half to travel in person, the message had managed in five hours. Five hours, and still too goddamn slow.</bq> <bq caption="Page 128">“I know who you are,” Amos said. The big man had been so quiet that both Murtry and Holden started with surprise. “Who am I?” Murtry asked, playing along. “A killer,” Amos said. His face was expressionless, his tone light. “You’ve got a nifty excuse and the shiny badge to make you seem right, but that’s not what this is about. You got off on smoking that guy in front of everyone. You can’t wait to do it again.” “Is that right?” Murtry asked. “Yeah. So, one killer to another, you don’t want to try that shit with us.” “Amos, easy,” Holden warned, but the other two men ignored him. “That sounded like a threat,” Murtry said. “Oh, it really was,” Amos replied with a grin. Holden realized both men had their hands below the table. “Hey, now.” “I think maybe one of us is going to end bloody,” Murtry said. “How about now?” Amos replied with a shrug. “I’m free now. We can just skip all the middle part.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 131">It touches something, and for a moment, a part of it that can feel, feels hope. It is unaware of hope. The reply does not come. It is not over. It will never be over. It reaches out, and finds new things. Old things. It flows into places that are comfortable for it to flow. There are responses, and the responses feed the impulses that caused them, and there are more responses. All automatic and empty and dead as it is. Nothing reaches back. It feels no disappointment. It does not shut down. It reaches out.</bq> <bq caption="Page 136">“You,” Lucia said, “took yourself away when you joined with those stupid violent people who blew up the shuttle. You drove them out to the ruins when they killed the RCE people. You made every choice that took you to this place. I love you, Basia Merton. I love you till my chest aches. But you are a stupid, stupid man. And when they take you away from me, I will not forgive you for it.” “You’re a harsh woman.” “I’m a doctor,” Lucia said. “I’m used to giving people bad news.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 150">“Part of the reason I came out here, part of the reason I agreed to this, was that we were going to do it right,” Elvi said, hearing the stress coming into her voice. “We were going to get a sealed environment. A dome. We were going to survey the planet and learn from it and be responsible about how we treated it. The RCE sent scientists. They sent researchers. Do you know how many of us have sustainability and conservation certifications? Five-sixths. Five-sixths.”</bq> And the military elements declare martial law. <bq caption="Page 151">“Uh, Captain?” the huge baby-man said. “Amos?” “There’s another mess of legal crap just came through from the UN for you.” Holden sighed. “Am I supposed to read it?” “Don’t see how they can make you,” Amos said. “Just thought you’d want to ignore it intentionally.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 163">Miller ignored him. “An empty apartment, a missing family, that’s creepy. But this is like finding a military base with no one on it. Fighters and tanks idling on the runway with no drivers. This is bad juju. Something wrong happened here. What you should do is tell everyone to leave.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 180">The monster from the desert shifted drunkenly, its legs awkward. Its one functioning arm twisted toward them, then collapsed to the ground. Its body shifted and trembled as it tried to lift it again.</bq> <bq caption="Page 182">An hour later, the great ruddy disk of the sun touched the horizon. The flames danced around the thing’s corpse, rising up higher than a bonfire. Greasy black smoke spiraled up toward the clouds, and the whole world seemed to reek of accelerants. Wei had taken a small tent from the loader’s storage, and Fayez had set it up. Elvi stood, the heat of the sun and the fire pressing against her face. The night was going to be long.</bq> This scene with the rifle and the stupidity and incomprehension and deliberate ignorance accompanied by an unearned confidence and sense of superiority calls to mind aboriginals who've managed to kill one of the occupier's dogs. <bq caption="Page 184">They sent out bridge builders to use those basic biological replicators, whatever their form. They can take a biosphere and turn it into a massively networked factory. It’s probably how they spread. Target the places that can be hijacked into making the things that let you get there. Also, they really built structures to last. They seem to have taken the long view on galactic colonizing.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 220">They hadn’t pissed in his locker, mostly because it hadn’t occurred to them.</bq> No. Because they don't waste water. <bq caption="Page 255">Holden had grown up in the Montana district of North America. A region filled with nostalgia for lost frontiers. It had held out against urban creep longer than most places in the former United States. The people there clung to their farms and ranches even when those things stopped making economic sense.</bq> This is so frustrating. It's this twisted logic where all of the beautiful places die because they stop making economic sense. This is a lie. The economy is not a mindless machine. It is steered. Steered by the rich to become more rich. Everyone else can either become like them...or die. <bq caption="Page 256">Did the people up there think about how momentous what they were all doing was? Holden worried that they didn’t. That the strangeness had already become normal, like the night scents of Ilus. That all they saw now was the conflict to be won and the treasure to be harvested.</bq> <bq caption="Page 404">[...] the fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air. It wasn’t something you thought about until it was a problem.</bq> Mostly the magnetosphere, not the air. <bq caption="Page 510">Something was here once. Something built all this, and left its meal half eaten on the table. The designers and engineers that spanned a thousand worlds had lived here and died here and left behind the everyday wonders like bones in the desert. The investigator knows this. The world is a crime scene, and the one thing that stands out—the one thing that doesn’t belong—is the place that nothing goes. It’s an artifact in a world of artifacts, but it doesn’t fit. What would they put in a place they couldn’t reach? Is it a prison, a treasure chest, a question that isn’t supposed to be asked?</bq> <bq caption="Page 549">“There’s a damaged piece of the system ahead,” Miller continued, “and I’d hoped we’d be able to get around it. No such luck. We’re on foot from here.” “Your fancy alien train is broken?” “My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.” “You are a sad, bitter little man,” Holden said as he climbed to his feet and pushed against the train door. It didn’t open.</bq> <bq caption="Page 554">About the time one-celled organisms on Earth were starting to think about maybe trying photosynthesis, something turned this whole damned planet off. Took it off the grid, and killed everything high enough up the food chain to have an opinion. If I’m right, the thing that did that’s not entirely gone. Every time something reaches into this one particular place, it dies.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 557">So, as far I can figure it, there are minerals native to this system that are fairly rare, galactically speaking.” “Lithium.” “That’s one,” Miller agreed. “This planet is a gas station. Process the ore, refine it, send it down to the power plants, then beam the collected energy out.” “To where?” “To wherever. There are lots of worlds like this one, and they all fed the grid. Not the rings, though. I still don’t know how they powered those.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 582">“I’m not cutting it,” he said again, more to himself than anyone else. Cutting it meant letting the Barb drift away, down into the upper atmosphere to rip apart and burn. To let Felcia burn. Alex had promised not to let that happen.</bq> Idiots like this don't deserve the win the author will give them. <bq caption="Page 602">It was hard to look at directly. The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous. And within that boundary, darkness swirled. It was more than an absence. She could sense a structure within it, layers interpenetrating, like shadows casting shadows. It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it.</bq> <bq caption="Page 619">Cells became molecules—countless and complex and varied. The demarcation of one thing and another failed. There was only a community of molecules, shifting in a vast dance. And then the atoms that made the molecules gave up their space, and she was a breath. A mist. A tiny play of fields and interactions in a vacuum as perfect as space. She was a vibration in nothingness.</bq> <bq caption="Page 621">He connects, and the investigator becomes the world. He feels it everywhere. The orbital bases, the power cores in the crushing depth of the ocean, the library vaults where the old ones had lived, the signaling stations high in the mountains, the cities deep beneath the ground. He is the world.</bq> <bq caption="Page 632">“No, what I want is Ceres Station or Earth or Mars. You know what they have in New York? All-night diners with greasy food and crap coffee. I want to live on a world with all-night diners. And racetracks. And instant-delivery Thai food made from something I haven’t already eaten seven times in the last month.”</bq>