More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This is Klamath Marsh. This place will have the right to call itself a Prince of Prisons to the world’s end, for here, in our hour of horror, mankind confined Ráðsviðr, “Plan-wise,” the first and only A.I. U-beast that used the intelligence we gifted it to plan murder.
Klamath!
“What’s CMSIJSS?” Papa and I answered that one together: “The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry Junior Scientists Squad.”
Don’t tell Achilles, reader. I think I let Utopia take Cato Weeksbooth. I think I might have let them become Troy.
It is with a heavy heart that I take up this chronicle. Mycroft Canner—long your guide and my beloved teacher—was killed in action six days ago, on Sunday the sixth of September, 2454.
NO!
You know my voice because I have been Mycroft’s editor, in the last books and this. I patched together their fragments, made bearable what was too passionate, and in the history I used to edit out the signs of Mycroft’s madness, though I’ve decided to leave them in this more recent chronicle.
They didn’t let us forget the war, but they did let us feel ready for it. Earth’s top musicians played old battle-marches, and they projected war art on the walls, and brought in great actors to read quotations: Homer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Korn, Faulkner, Gerribloom, Siegfried Sassoon, Osamu Tezuka, Euripides, Sun-tzu, and Victor Hugo.
Mycroft always said no one should mourn them. Well, shut up, Mycroft, we’re going to make you eat your lunch, and take your pills, and sleep your hours, and rest your rest, and we’re going to mourn you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. And we’re going to make sure your damned seeds fly.
What am I supposed to do now? Write an obituary? I’m the Anonymous, I have to write an obituary for civilization as we know it, not just Mycroft Canner. Then someone said I’d better take over Mycroft’s chronicle and—strange, I just finished crying, I didn’t expect this sentence to make me start again. Someone said I’d better take over Mycroft’s chronicle. So here I am.
HERE ENDS The Will to Battle Mycroft Canner’s Chronicle of how Humanity learned to make War again HERE BEGINS THE WAR ITSELF whose Chronicle I name for Mycroft’s hope and mine Perhaps the Stars
