Salvation Lost (Salvation Sequence, #2)

by Peter F. Hamilton

Back then he’d been so much more decisive; age wasn’t turning out to be wisdom, just uncertainty.

“It’s not governments I have an issue with—or not the concept of democratic government, anyway. But all we have now is rule by rich people, the ones who keep ninety percent of the world in relative poverty so their unbalanced market can continue paying for a lifestyle of total excess.”

“Nobody wants to level down. If you think that, you’re believing your own side’s propaganda. I just want to stop the monstrous inequality that Universal culture’s obsession with the Market has given us, to give everyone a fair share.

And where exactly did you draw the line between artificial responses and the genuine ones? If a fake was indistinguishable from real didn’t that make it real, too? That question had bedeviled philosophers greater than she for millennia; there certainly wasn’t a test for it.

Emilja Jurich smiled wanly at Alik over the table. “How’s it going?” He sat down hard in a chair opposite her and scowled at the vase of bright tangerine roses blocking the full line of sight between them. “Basically, it’s a shitstorm without end. Too many of our boonie folk think they’re true survivalists and this is the glorious moment they’ve been waiting for all their lives; its going to be a heroic gunfight where their hunting lasers and grenade launchers will save the day. Then there’s all the naturevists who reject city life and aren’t going to go live under a shield no matter what. Half the evangelicals think elevation is actually the Rapture, while the other half think Salvation of Life is hell itself falling out of the sky and the devil is sitting on his throne inside. Either way, neither side is leaving the cult compound. Then there’s a whole bunch of radical assholes claiming it’s all a supremacist plot to turn the cities into concentration camps for every underclass victim of capitalism, and once the poor are inside they’ll never get out again. You know what, I have no fucking idea why the Olyix think we are worth elevating in the first place.

“Don’t waste your breath. You can’t help the terminally stupid.