A Half-Built Garden

by Ruthanna Emrys

The fourth power was money. The forms we built took on life of their own, and the power we created escaped from our grasp and devoured us.

“I’m not against humanity going to the stars. But if we leave Earth behind, we won’t make it out there, either.

The corporations tried to do the same thing, but they’d create needs in order to fill them. It looked symbiotic, but it was one-sided, because most of the needs weren’t real. Or else they created artificial shortages of true needs, to make their goods worth more. They’re parasites.”

too many people had died still trying desperately to be rational, polite, forgiving.

But they were among the hundreds of thousands who acted out of billions who couldn’t, or who didn’t want to, or who never heard about the movements until they were well underway.

“Do you think we beat these bastards by glaring at them?”

I might lie in the dark with my wheels spinning, but the wheels in question were mostly logistical and ethical quandaries rather than rehashes of all my imagined worst mistakes.

I trust you to do what you think is right. That’s how I trust most people.

The planet has seen six mass extinctions, counting this one; something has kept going through all of them. Making sure human civilization survives is the real challenge, and we’re figuring that out.

“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”

plains-ache is the yearning for an evolutionary ecology you’ve never lived in yourself, the body’s bone-deep knowledge of things that would make it not healthiest but happiest, that would feel right and quiet the anxiety-monkey behind your civilized forebrain.

Algorithms were inherently biased—it was why you had to design deliberately for the biases that mattered to you.