Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia.

Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

by eleven I already had the first suspicions that I might not be exactly the kind of person I wanted to be,

the disorienting sense of one reality slipping away and being replaced by another.

It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual.

“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

“My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.”

In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.