“They took the wrong branch. The thing they made a nightmare-weapon of … it was a technological displacement. They were supposed to discover the secret of »enacting their relational intelligences in the »minds they forge together. And produce ‘a star of transentience’ in the mind of their species.

They inverted this, and produced a physical bomb that obliterates intelligences outright, and rips holes in 7 kinds of more-than-merely-living domains they failed to conceive of.”

— every intelligent creature in the universe