Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds, p. 560:
...Calvin had shared all that he had felt, or that for a moment their thoughts--and more--had liquified and flowed indivisibly, along with a trillion others. And that he understood perfectly what had happened, because in the moment of shared wisdom, all his questions had been answered.
"We were read weren't we? .... For a moment I think we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light."
"A computer," Calvin said...."That's what Hades is. A computer made out of nuclear matter, the mass of a star devoted to processing information, storing it. And this light is an aperture into it; a way to enter the computational matrix.
Vineland, pp. 90-91:
If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least - an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name - its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune. And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.
Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 650-651:
Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, but it's only information, glow-modulated, harmless, nothing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful that Byron once envisioned back there in his Baby ward, in his innocence.
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