Void (The Far Reaches, #2)

by Veronica Roth

No one sought a job on an interstellar transport ship because their life was working out as planned.

“What is it the Jovians say? ‘Joy is the thief of time, and time is the thief of joy’?”

Now, though the ship was still a marvel to Ace, it likely looked out of date to its passengers, for whom technology and aesthetics had changed dramatically since its construction. No matter. There was still only one Redundancy.

She saw all this in bits and pieces, as she arrived at a planet to pick up passengers or departed it after dropping them off; she saw them as a god might, ageless and detached from the flow of time. She hadn’t realized when she took this job how it would make her into something other, something distinct from humanity yet still technically human, but it had.

Odd that you could be in the expanse to define all expanses—what the astropoets called the “Big Empty”—and still feel claustrophobic, but the mind was not built to comprehend such endlessness. Humans liked containers.

“You know more about corpses than I was expecting.” “I don’t have some kind of dark past, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Georgina had also told her they could put them in the air supply to gas everyone, if necessary. Better for everyone to get knocked out than to enact some kind of Lord of the Flies scenario out here in the void.

Some people came to the Redundancy to escape the great tragedies of their lives, and some people came because they hated humanity;

Ace sighed. “Don’t you want to be thorough, Polaris? Cross every ‘i,’ dot every ‘t’?” “You’re getting that wrong just to irritate me.”

Everything was Modernist-Futurist now. Well—not “now” anymore. By the time she returned, they would be on to something new, or back to the old.

Empires fell and rose, governments rebuilt themselves and collapsed, borders shifted, power flowed in and out, and still the Redundancy flew its endless circuit between star systems. The one thing that was constant was people fucking up what they’d made.

But sometimes what you think is a shroud of mystery is just a fucking shroud.”

“Only—out here we’re also impossibly big,” she said. “Bigger than time. We watch kingdoms rise and fall. Names change. Fashions change. A thousand tiny cataclysms pass us by, and we see better than anybody, you know? That all things pass.”

An eternity, really, depending on how tiny you allowed time to be. A millisecond was nothing compared to an hour, and an hour was nothing compared to an eon. It was all relative in the void.

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy—that was the mantra for space travel, the mantra for which the Redundancy was named.