The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3)

by John Scalzi

If you were smart . . . well, if you were smart you wouldn’t have done pretty much any of the things you’ve done.

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.

And thus it was in the Interdependency in the early-but-not-all-that-early-anymore days of the Flow collapse. Everyone knew what was coming. Some even prepared and planned. But at the end of it, everyone assumed that something or someone would come along to save the civilization that they lived in and could not conceive of actually disappearing. Something or someone would come along to save them. They would be saved, along with everyone else.

They both came away from the meeting feeling like they had manipulated the other precisely, which meant it was a good meeting.

“Looking back on your life and knowing how much better you could have been is never a great feeling.

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.”

Advantages: She was fucking alive, which honestly had come as something of a surprise to her after being shot in the face.