Only Human (Themis Files, #3)

by Sylvain Neuvel

—So you send in tanks, a hundred thousand men and have them take the Pepsi challenge with an AK-47 to their head. I don’t see how that makes you any different than the other guy.

But part of me sometimes wishes she would go first. We haven’t had the how-to-survive-a-plane-crash-in-the-Andes talk yet.

I thought it would be different. I thought the world would have come together like never before after they were attacked. They’d been hurt. Everyone had. More than anything, they’d been hurt equally, randomly. None of the people who died did anything to deserve it. They were from all walks of life, rich and poor, from every religion. For the first time in history, there was a “them” everyone could point the finger at. That should have come with an even bigger “us.”

You build a revolution on ideas. If the population doesn’t buy your ideas, it means they’re not ready, or you’re wrong. There’s this tendency for people to see any fight against the system as a fight for progress. As if the people before them couldn’t possibly have gotten anything right. If you’re using bombs instead of words, that means you’re banking on people giving you what you want out of fear instead of reason. That’s never a good sign.

[Vincent, if you don’t answer me now, I’ll fill Themis with VX gas and listen to you twitch and gargle for a minute or two while I eat lunch. I swear, I’ll put you on speaker, so I can hold my knish with both hands.]