“The thought of creating an artificial creature for the sole purpose of carrying out a murder made Riffan shrivel inside. He was an anthropologist, well acquainted with humanity’s history of violence, whether one-on-one or between tribes and nations, or against the Earth itself. But those had been ancient conflicts, an aspect of history seldom repeated on the frontier, where time and distance and the need for cooperation had filtered the genome and shaped the culture so that interpersonal violence was rarely encountered.”