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To the women who are done with other people’s shit
Ghreni, whose eyes had been closed during the entire ground crash, opened them to find his aircar upright. Blaine Turnin’s body was in the seat opposite him, quiet, composed and restful, looking for all the world like he had not been a human maraca bean for the last half minute. Only Turnin’s head, tilted at an angle that suggested the bones in his neck had been replaced by overcooked pasta, suggested that he might not, in fact, be taking a small and entirely refreshing nap.
“The fact you are trying to reduce a civil war to ‘she started it’ does not fill me with confidence,”
And since I can tell you’re not the sort to show any actual goddamned initiative on your own part, you fucking cognitive mudfart, I care that your shitty little house is insulting me and my house—both of my houses, since I am still of House
fucking Lagos. I care because I fucking care. And you and your shitty little house have picked the absolute wrong fucking individual to try to push around.
Kiva turned back to Heuvel. “So if you want your great-great-great-grandchildren working on this as the oxygen leaks out of their habitat, go to court with this force majeure crap. We’ll be there, watching them turn blue. Until then, get the fuck out of my office.” “I enjoy watching you work,” Fundapellonan said, after Heuvel got the fuck out of Kiva’s office.
Kiva was extremely self-interested. Senia thought that was neither good nor bad, but Kiva was of a different mind about that. She thought it was pretty much the only way to be in a universe that didn’t care about anyone’s life one way or another, and in a civilization that was designed to keep the rich as rich as possible and the poor from actively starving so they wouldn’t think to rise up and behead the rich. An uncaring universe and a fundamentally static civilization would smother anyone who didn’t keep themselves and their own concerns front and center.
Admittedly Kiva’s philosophy of pragmatic, committed selfishness wouldn’t work as well for just about anyone else as it had for her, but fuck them, they weren’t Kiva.
She was just a speck of animated carbon that would be eternally inanimate soon enough, so might as well go ahead and have another muffin, or lay that cute redhead, or whatever.
The time span she was likely to be around (barring assassination, unintentional overdoses and falls down flights of stairs) now exceeded that of the civilization she lived in. Which meant that some portion of her life—possibly decades—
would become exceedingly fucking uncomfortable unless things were done by people in positions of power to avoid that.
Kiva had been struck by a realization that, if not exactly an epiphany, was certainly enough to make her stop in her tracks: Either she was going to have to become less fundamentally selfish, or she was
going to have to find a way to make others less so.
Things had reached a certain tipping point for selfish and self-interested human beings. As far as Kiva could tell, whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages: Denial. Denial. Denial. Fucking Denial.
Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run.
Cardenia still found Marce’s faults endearing, and Marce was either too gallant or too circumspect to say anything about hers. Cardenia idly wondered if they would ever get to the point where faults weren’t endearing, and rather than amusedly tolerating his snoring, she would seek to smother him with a pillow. She had never been in a relationship that lasted that long. She imagined that even as she was smothering her beloved she would be delighted that they had managed to get to that point.
In the meantime, she lay there, arm draped across Marce’s chest, as the conversation between the two cavemen that he was snoring out came to a conclusion and the participants decamped, perhaps in search of a mastodon. Marce quieted down to his usual low level of snore.
The stateroom featured a fold-up bunk that included straps to secure the occupant when the push fields went out, which was not infrequently. The mattress on the bunk was two centimeters thick and apparently made out of particleboard and despair, and the sleeping bag she was provided, despite assurances that it had been cleaned and sanitized, smelled like decades of lonely spacemen had diddled themselves in it and left the remains to stew.
As the simulation continued, the predictive confidence of the simulation decreased, represented by the blue streams wobbling as they entered their estimated collapse window, and the red streaks fading to white the less confident the simulation was.
The second reason was that the ruling class of the Interdependency, favoring financial and social stability over having the lumpenproletariat trying to rip their heads from their necks at every opportunity, opted to have the Interdependency’s baseline standard of living one where no one starved, or was without shelter, or died of easily preventable diseases or went bankrupt if they had a heart attack or lost a job, or both.
Marce understood why he was dreaming his mathematical dreams and even appreciated it in an intellectual sense. It didn’t make it less enervating. To work on mathematics all day and to dream of mathematics all night meant Marce woke up all mathed out.
They both came away from the meeting feeling like they had manipulated the other precisely, which meant it was a good meeting.
“What the hell?” Wolfe said. Kiva pointed to the other man. “You. Fuck off.” There was pounding at the door. Kiva ignored it. Drusin Wolfe put a hand on the other man’s arm to forestall any fucking off. “Are you insane? You can’t just barge into my office and tell people to fuck off.”
Kiva noticed there was a very slight pause between when she stopped talking and Nadashe responded. This suggested that wherever Nadashe currently was, it was not on Hub itself; rather somewhere far enough away that there was just a smidgen of light-speed
When it came to blowing up other people’s plans, Kiva was the best, and was getting better as she went along. And this little adventure was right in line with Kiva’s decision, made not long after her first tussle with the House of Wolfe, to force change on others for the betterment of all, whether they wanted it or not. This coup attempt was going to fucking fail, and it would be because of Kiva, and when it was done maybe the Interdependency, or at least its people, would be that much closer to being saved.
Lies do not in themselves lead to poor outcomes, nor does truth in every circumstance lead to good ones. As with so many things, context matters.”
I had a specific goal, which was to form the Interdependency, and then once founded to strengthen it to survive its early years. Truth and lies and everything in between were in service to those goals.” “The ends justified the means.” “At the time I would have said it differently.” “What would you have said?” “That the end was too important to foreclose any particular means.”
Nadashe could never recall being “nice” in the generic sense of the term. Polite? Certainly. Respectful? When appropriate or necessary. Nice? No. Nice felt like an abdication. Like an admission of defeat. Like someone who was a supplicant, rather than a superior or, at least, a peer.
That’s Just Your Opinion, Sir
This Indecision’s Bugging Me
The idea that all of this information, all of this knowledge, had been flung down a memory hole for fifteen hundred years briefly brought Marce to a state that could only be described as existential despair.
This is how the Free Systems had collapsed the Flow stream out of their part of space; they’d created a hyperspatial equivalent of a resonator, chucked it into the Flow stream and set it off, collapsing that particular stream. That was the Rupture.
