The Long Game (The Far Reaches, #4)

by Ann Leckie

The company might know how to make you all live longer. It probably does. But it won’t do anything to help you make that happen unless it gets something out of it. And there’s nothing the company would get out of it that it isn’t already getting from you.”

“When you’re small,” said Nish, after a moment’s silence, “you survive by being patient, and clever. You can’t make big things happen all at once, so you do what little things you can. It’s not unlike seeing you want a pond and thinking of all the little steps you need to build that pond, and then taking those steps, one by one. Of course, the more steps, the harder it is to accomplish big things like this, when you don’t live long.”

“The humans have a thing they call the long game. Most humans, just like people, are usually just thinking of today. What can they eat today? How can they stay safe today? But then sometimes they’re thinking way ahead, thinking of things too big for them to do here and now. It’s how they’ve done things like go into the sky or read the instructions of life.”

I might have to do some of it and leave the rest to some other person, years from now. “What if I did a long game?”