Exordia

by Seth Dickinson

She tries to imagine her soul running on JavaScript. This makes her shudder so hard her crossed legs knock at the ankles.

“What the fuck, man. You guys are the worst.” “That’s objectively correct. Can your wet round eyes see now?”

Anna, against all mythological advice, looks back.

Clayton gets anxious if he’s not surrounded by game pieces to push around. Erik was a knight in their last game, at least. Maybe a rook. He hopes he’s not crooked enough for bishop.

She looks like she really doesn’t want to stumble over her words, and doesn’t want to sound fucked up either, so she just stops for a second.

There are different factions, different aliens competing for control of it. Like, um, Interstellar Pig … you read that book? Anyone? That was my first English chapter book…”

Eeeeeeeeeeee! My childhood!

It is intrinsically and absolutely wrong to set aside the duties of ethics because you believe that you, you alone, are smart enough to violate them.

The lab is a still death.

As if you hired an artist to riff on the style of an alphabet they didn’t understand.

Hello, generative AI. This feels interwoven enough that I suspect it had to be there when the author put the manuscript down in ~2017 but it feels super-relevant.

Isn’t that ironic? Oh, come on, Khaje, it is! It’s marvelously ironic! It’s so classically ironic that it’s invented pederasty and gone to war with Sparta.”

Knowing it’s hormones doesn’t help, any more than learning Newton lets you defy gravity.

You quote MLK when he sounds like a moderate but you don’t quote MLK when he’s in jail.

You’re more worried about what people think of me than of what I think of myself.

dude, we’re seventeen. We can’t be in love. We have no judgment.

She looks like she’s studying you through a telescope, complete with a Jodie Foster expression of awe.

My childhood, again!

“Do forgive me, Clayton, it’s usually wise to assume you humans have forgotten what happened two minutes ago. I doubt you can remember what you smelled two minutes ago, and if you can’t do that, can you remember anything at all?

Democracy was going out. Something new was coming in, something that ruled not by the consent of the people but by manufacturing that consent—

Fr. Gokongwei liked to say that the universe is very large and very strange, and yet God’s favorite thing in all of it is our fear that one mortal error might put the whole design in jeopardy. As if we could.

God, she said to him, I wonder how you would’ve lived my life. She wants to know his answer. She wants God’s answer: How would God have lived her life?

the Glock that Ssrin left her back in New York.

Chekhov again?

“Why?” She doesn’t accept it. “Well, you see”—right about here Chaya realizes he is a lecturer—“

Destroying the world probably won’t even create shareholder value for aliens.

She lifts her hands from the keyboard, a pianist caught halfway through her etude. Chaya is careful around her fingers. Don’t hurt the math pedipalps.

“An enemy of death. Reminds me of books I liked.” He looks curiously at her. “In life’s name, for life’s sake…?” “Yeah.” She grins. Khaje groans and stirs on her stretcher. “You nerd.” He grins back at her. “Me? Weren’t you too old for books like that by the time you learned English?” “You’re never too old to be a wizard.” “I think in those books you could actually be too old to be a wizard.” “Shut up,” she says.

I've been waiting for this ever since the claudication came up.

“Is it brave or stupid to use American imperial adventures as a business opportunity?” “Great question. I’d refer you to the Bush administration to answer that one.”

Who are the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, anyway? Chiron, Genghis Khan, Hoof and Mouth, and … Misty of Chincoteague?”

What would you say to describe this soul?” There’s a long silence. One of the Ugandans offers: “The soul is what gives you the strength to change things you don’t think can be changed.” Clayton, foolishly, blows past this.

Checkhov's soul, definitely this time.

The weak nuclear force, a tenuous and pathetic influence, is still 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times stronger than gravity. (Physicists call this the hierarchy problem. If the world gender pay gap were as big as the gap between the strength of gravity and the weak nuclear force, then for every dollar made by a man, women would entirely cease to exist.)

With his right hand he holds his rifle, forming a chord joining his shoulder to his hand, drawing a secant line down into the earth. That chord is tangent to the curve of log(x) at x = 0.12, which is a value very close to 1/root(69). Nice.

“This was the bad guy’s plan in Die Another Day,” someone told me, which I think was wrong: either GoldenEye or Goldfinger? I was too worried to correct him.

If the world is ending I think you have a right to stop bettering yourself; I think you have a right to just feel okay.

Anna feels like she’s in an off-Broadway production of something—she doesn’t know what, she’s not cultured. Waiting for God.

“Is that really love?” “It’s a theory of love,” Chaya says. “But maybe not a practice.”

“Back in the Cold War,” Clayton says, “someone proposed storing the nuclear launch codes in a living man’s heart. The president would have to kill the guy to get the codes out. The idea was rejected. Because it was thought that the need to kill the guy and cut out his heart would deter the President from giving the launch order, and compromise our deterrence.”

In Erik’s opinion, only weasels play trolley games. Heroes jump down there and start pulling people off the tracks. Heroes pass laws regulating better trolley brakes. That’s how you make a society.

Imagine your life without the best person you’ve ever known. Savor for a moment the fear that you are already living that life: that you have missed the people who were supposed to be your everything, and now you are walking forward into gray wastelands, far off the map you were born to follow.