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Unlike so many of those born into the privilege, Diana and Sofia knew that the American dream was real. For them, it wasn’t some abstract idea of freedom, a marketing gimmick, or a sacrosanct Constitution. No. It was a ticket out of hell and a shred of hope for the hopeless.
American authority had waned since its heyday as the world’s only superpower, but the United States was still the only place where starting a new life from scratch wasn’t just possible but normal to the point of being boring. Even though Congress was a deadlocked mess and rhetoric was viciously divisive, against all logic, America still believed it could make the world a better place.
Americans still maintained faith in their ability to forge their own destiny, realize their wild and often misguided dreams. That faith, that belief, was the only...
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“The Dutch build parallel dikes for redundancy,” she said. “There are three kinds: watcher, sleeper, and dreamer. The watcher dike is right up against the water. If it fails, the sleeper is ready. If the sleeper fails, the dreamer is the last defense against disaster.”
“That’s who we’re protecting. Real Americans. Not the bullshit artists in Congress whose only constituency is themselves. Fuck them. Fuck the desk jockeys. Fuck the freeloaders and the hate-mongers and the con artists. This country isn’t perfect, but it stands for something real. Freedom, democracy, second chances. It’s corny because it’s true.”
Espionage was mostly logistics.
“There’s a peculiar melancholy specific to fading empire,” said Helen. “The Romans, the Mongols, the British, they all knew what it meant to see inherited glory rust away to nothing. America peaked in the final years of the twentieth century, its enemies defeated and its strength uncontested.
The only way to move through intrigue’s dominion was like a shark: you either kept swimming, or you died.
The feed is already global. The economy is already global. Everything is already global except for our political institutions, and that fundamentally undermines their efficacy.
This is a way to renew our country and divert the course of history. We don’t have to fade into the geopolitical background like the Brits.
This country was founded on rebelling against a foreign monarch. We are a symbol of self-determination, of the power of independence. If we become what we once resisted, we lose everything. We achieve so much more as a bastion than we ever could as an empire.”
That was how the engine of war advanced, quietly, relentlessly, throwing shadows in the forms of premonitions you couldn’t quite dispel.
Facts might be facts, but truth was relative.
Diana hated these vast tracts of monoculture. They were precisely the opposite of what she had tried to achieve in her greenhouse. They were a green desert, a poor, brittle ecosystem whose lack of biodiversity increased short-term yield at the expense of everything else.
Despite her age, she didn’t live in the past, hobbled by the constraints of experience even as she harvested its benefits. It was awe inspiring.
Logic was important, but people put rationality on a pedestal. You didn’t change someone’s mind with a frontal assault, lobbing facts at them with an intellectual trebuchet.
If you truly wanted to sway someone, you had to understand them first, figure out how they felt and why they felt it. Then you worked your way up from emotions and values to beliefs and points of view. The long route to decision-making was the only accurate one.
When you owned your own decisions, you owned your own sins.
