Fuzzy Nation

by John Scalzi

“Well, life is like that sometimes,” Isabel said. “We learn things too late, and then we don’t get to use them.”

“Now,” she said, “imagine what would have happened if half a million years ago, some alien creature landed on our planet, looked at our ancestors, decided that they weren’t actually people, and just took all the planet’s ores and oil. How far would we have ever gotten?”

Better to be a monkey and not be able to understand what’s been taken from you, than to be a man and be able to understand all too well—and be helpless to stop it.

“Let me put it to you this way: Sometimes in life you’re going to win and sometimes you’re going to lose. But just because you lose doesn’t mean the other guy needs to win. Do you understand me?”

“At first I was doing it for myself,” Holloway said, after a minute. “Because that’s what I had always done, and it always seemed to work for me. Then later, I was doing it because I was curious to see what could happen, and how well that would work out for me. And then finally I was doing it because I knew what had to happen, and I knew that I was the only one who could make it happen.”