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Chen had been beholden to Moss’s kindness, in ways Grayson would never understand. You had to be there. You couldn’t conceive. Empathy wasn’t enough. Imagination wasn’t enough.
it could be a particularly devious AI wormholing back under the power of a self-made destiny.
The Company had tick-engorged itself across all timelines.
In space, discipline meant life or death. Here, there had been no penalty for freedom until the end.
But there would come a terrible and obliterating day when beauty was the only thing that mattered, and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. And on that day, the globes embedded in the walls hurt to look upon because the price paid for the wonders displayed within was too high. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical.
That love must be unbending. Love must be cruel. Love must not yield. Otherwise, love meant nothing, could do nothing.
Still she was left picking the worry spot on the back of her left hand bloody.
Most people living under the bridge over the years have been institutionalized, then released. Left to wander.
the words meant nothing to me. Kitchen meant nothing to me. All the sunken, skewed tables and beds and chairs and sofas and slanted paintings, stinking of the poisons they released. All the useless chandeliers broken across the pointless marbled floors. Nothing. What a nothing you made out of the world you were given.
a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.
A fox is vermin. Ought to be shot. Quite right. Loose the hounds, my good man. Train them first on the kits, or the hounds will never learn to kill a full-grown fox. Tally. Tallyho.
“What about the weather?” But you could not talk about the weather on this Earth. The weather had turned bad. The weather was a traitor. “What about sports?” But you could not talk about sports because the weather had “fucked up” the sports.
“That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.”
“Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”
in the end, joy cannot fend off evil. Joy can only remind you why you fight.
The sun was a star. I knew that, even then. I knew we live on a planet. I can sense magnetic fields. I can feel the weight of the Earth turning. I can listen to the networks between trees and view their own map of constellations.
My mate watched from the bushes. She knew she couldn’t save me, and I didn’t want her to try. Still I saw her. As I faded. As I faded into becoming something else, not new or old. As they took me away. Still looking into her eyes.
No strength left for being strong.
