Structure
Surface Detail states that Contact has, within the last few centuries, reorganized and established at least three specialist sub-branches akin to Special Circumstances:
- Restoria, nicknamed "Pest Control", has charge of "the management, amelioration and - if necessary - obliteration" of "hegemonizing swarms", technological (or even cultural) entities that exist to convert as much of the universe as possible into more of themselves, as with grey goo.
- The Quietudinal Service, or Quietus, is tasked with interacting with virtual Afterlives.
- Numina, tasked with dealing with the Galaxy's Sublimed civilizations
Read more about this topic: Contact (The Culture)
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“I’m a Sunday School teacher, and I’ve always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself—a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in society, as described by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others, don’t permit us to achieve perfection.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.”
—C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993)