Attempting to redeem myself,say something normal,not let on that I already know he's employed here-thanks to the raven who allowed me to spy on him earlier,I say, 'So,I guess you hang out here a lot then?' Wanting to say: I remember everything-all of it-the question is: Do you? But instead, I stare down at my feet, smiling stupidly. Well, Xiao Luo, I’ve got to go.” “Take care, Professor.” Ye Wenjie went off through the twilight to her final meet-up. I might come to you for guidance, though.” “I’m afraid there won’t be that opportunity.… In that case, you might as well just forget I said anything. But I’ll remember what you said and give it a whirl. Use those two axioms as a starting point for your discipline, and you might end up becoming the Euclid of cosmic sociology.” “I’m no Euclid. But you’re clever enough to figure them out. Can you explain them?” Ye Wenjie glanced at her watch. I don’t know why, really.… One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion, and the technological explosion.” “Interesting terms.

“I’ve been thinking about this for most of my life, but I’ve never spoken about it with anyone before. “Those two axioms are solid enough from a sociological perspective … but you rattled them off so quickly, like you’d already worked them out,” Luo Ji said, a little surprised.

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin