Breach (Analog, #3)

by Eliot Peper

Global open immigration for members, feed credits replacing national currencies, subsidized information infrastructure for critical services, blah, blah, blah.”

“The Mongols conquered the world with innovative cavalry tactics. The Europeans conquered it with guns, germs, and steel. Rachel conquered it with infrastructure. It’s brilliant in a sneaky-little-shit kinda way. Win everyone over with how convenient and useful the feed is. Let it spread its tendrils everywhere. And then, once everyone has become totally dependent on your freakishly pervasive system, pull the rug out from under them.

It wasn’t about the money. These people had left behind any limits on personal consumption long ago. At this scale, wealth was simply a proxy for power, fungible for its political, social, and other equivalents.

Dag would have pointed out that this was precisely how human societies had operated throughout history, that modern humans had simply renamed what had once been termed nobility to make ourselves feel better. And Emily would have responded that such a precedent was all the more reason to fight for something better.

What better argument for inaction than the promise of future action? What better defenders of the status quo than well-meaning leaders who hedged? A quote floated up from a half-forgotten high-school history class. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Rosa had once remarked to Emily that all of literature was just a single extended conversation, and Emily had responded that hip-hop was too. Perhaps everything was, at the end of the day.

“Instead of trying to cover up the damage, the repair is illuminated, the imperfections transformed into a source of beauty. I’ve always seen kintsugi as a physical manifestation of mono no aware, the pathos of impermanence, the gentle awareness that everything, all of us, are fragile and transient, that change is the only constant, that we are, at our best, lovingly reconstructed patchworks of our shattered selves.”