End of Days (Circuit of Heaven Book 2)

by Dennis Danvers

“People don’t want to think, Donnie. They want to enjoy themselves.”

But tell me, Doctor, since you’re so interested in death, why don’t you just commit suicide? Maybe he can’t either, Stephanie thought. A: Suicide is an act of despair. I want a meaningful death. Q: And what could possibly make death meaningful? A: A meaningful life.

“But sooner or later, don’t you think we’ll all have had our fill of immortality? This is our world—programmed as we choose. The wise folks who gave us immortality set it up that way. There was only one thing they hadn’t counted on: Without death, we don’t really care. Without death, we don’t know what we want.”

If nuclear weapons were in God’s Plan, Tillman would rather be an atheist.

What if Christ had thought, I better not stick my neck out. I could get in some serious trouble here. Think I’ll just angle for a cushy post in the countryside somewhere.

Forget the past. That’s what forgetting’s for.

There were so many downsides to this deal, it was like a coal mine.

Mom, show me how this life thing’s done. Like Laura would know. You jump out of the nest, kid, and eventually you hit the ground.

There you go, kid: love, devotion, fighting for what you believe in.

Fairy dust for a fairy world, or glowing cinders borne aloft by the fires of hell.

He’s filled with such joy he wants to live forever.

There was a Construct expression he’d heard several times these last few weeks he’d been living among them—Everything matters, or nothing matters—and he liked that. It seemed to him to be what Christ was saying: Every grain of sand matters.

All were thinking with a single mind: It’s time to die. No regrets.

They were joyous. They were joy: A still point forgetting nothing. And then, a vast newness, again.