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The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words—the life-changing ones—should echo a little. But they didn’t. They sounded just like everything else.
What the protomolecule did biologically, while not entirely explicable yet, at least seemed like it might be fully understood some day. The mechanisms by which it hijacked life and repurposed it were incredibly advanced, but not totally dissimilar to things like viruses and parasitic fungi. She didn’t understand all the rules yet, but she felt like she could, given enough time and research.
Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.
“I don’t know. I don’t like things that can only happen once. You can’t make sense of something when there’s no pattern. One data point is the same as none.”
Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.
That was what decades of marriage were for. Intimacy and pattern matching as a kind of telepathy.
There were so many last times that passed unrecognized.
She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion.
Even when they were gone, the next generation up would keep echoes of them.
Outgrowing your family? Hard work under the best of circumstances.
