The Lost Colony (The Long Winter, #3)

by A.G. Riddle

“Two fundamental forces. In a battle that stretches from the beginning of the universe to the end. Forces greater than matter and energy. Took me a while, but it was obvious once I figured out the spheres. Those two forces are space and time.”

She was a walking, talking reality distortion field.

She was becoming an activist even then. Under pseudonyms, she penned op-ed pieces that were widely read, shared, and contested. She reveled in it. At her core, she had a simple belief: If you’re right about something, that gives you the authority to act on it, to stand and not back down. The consequences don’t matter—the world will catch up eventually.

“At the center of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a place where the curvature of spacetime is infinite. What’s even stranger is that this singularity has no volume, but it contains all of the mass of the entire black hole. It has infinite density. At the black hole’s event horizon, the gravity it exerts is so strong that not even light can escape. Anything

that crosses an event horizon can never return. That should not be possible.”

Our brains crave certainty because only in certainty can we know that we are safe and that those we love will be safe. In times of great uncertainty, that survival instinct drives us to achieve certainty. In doing so, the brain can overreact. It can malfunction. It can drive us to act, even in times when the right thing to do is wait.”