Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick (Zoey Ashe #2)

by David Wong

[A] flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. KURT VONNEGUT

When you get sick of what’s in front of you, yeah, fixing it is never as appealing as just walking away and starting fresh. It’s the reason the landfills are choked with stuff that could easily be repaired and it’s the reason action movies are always about killing psychopaths instead of helping them get better mental health meds.

Mankind, he had told her, had spent much of the twentieth century dreaming of colonizing the stars (why fix civilization when you can just run away and build a brand-new one?), but by the 1980s or so everyone had soured on the idea. Colonizing Mars, everyone eventually realized, would be unbelievably difficult and the only reward for interplanetary trailblazers would be that they’d have to live on goddamned Mars. By the early 2020s, a new and better idea started to take hold among the ultra-wealthy and powerful: just recolonize the earth instead. Go find some sparsely populated area with a weak or disinterested government and just start building a brand-new city that would function under its own rules. Everything could be fresh, new, and efficient, free of the baggage and stagnation that was weighing down the rest of the modern world. And really, what’s the worst that could happen, other than the new city descending into a dystopian hell of poverty, terror, and bloodshed?

Arthur had apparently once confided to Will that if one possessed the skill to craft sufficiently elaborate and convincing lies, then no other skills were really necessary.

She was struggling to breathe. Wu was asking her things, expressing concern. She couldn’t really hear him. Will was watching her, saying nothing. She looked at him and tried to steady her voice. “Is … is this my fault?” “Why are you asking that question?” “Why can’t you just say ‘no’ when I ask something like that? God.” “You’re not a child,” said Will, gently. “I won’t treat you like one. You’re asking me if this was your fault because you want to know what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling right now. Are you supposed to be beating yourself up? Well, that’s the wrong question. The world doesn’t care about your emotions.” “So what question should I be asking?” “Whether or not you would do it differently next time. Everything that happens matters only in terms of what you can learn from it going forward.”

“They know we didn’t kill Tilley. Or do any of the other stuff. They have to know, deep down. The whole thing about us being cannibals, or whatever. They don’t even believe it, they’re not even trying all that hard to make the story consistent.” “There are things people actually believe,” said Andre, “and things they only pretend to believe because it’s convenient. But over time it don’t matter which is which, it all just blurs together. People are like that.” “Okay, so why would they choose to believe this particular awful thing?” “Because they hate you, Zoey. And because they hate you, they need to come up with a reason to hate you. See, because otherwise, they’re just bad people.” “What? That doesn’t even—why do they hate me in the first place?” “When you played ball, were you best buddies with all the other girls on the team? Did you all hang out together in the off-season?” “No.” “But when you were together on the court, when you won, you felt something. Maybe any other time you couldn’t carry on a conversation with any one of them without wanting to blow your brains out, but on the court, you suddenly had a bond. All of them differences fell away. That’s why we have sports, the game is just a pretext to let you go out there and feel that.” “So it’s just a game to them? Is that it?” “Well, that feeling, you get that in a war zone, too, only a hundred times stronger. So call it a game or a war or whatever, ultimately it’s just about that bond. So, yeah, the thing they ...

“Being against power is easy, Zoey, because you never, ever need to offer solutions or take risks. Exercising power in the right way is what’s hard. This system favors psychopaths in the same way that basketball favors the tall.

“Zoey, there is a … cloud … that hangs over me. I can’t explain it to you, because you haven’t yet been down this road. All I can say is that something will happen in your life that will slice right through it, an inflamed wound separating everything that comes after from all that came before. The end of a career, the loss of a limb, the death of a spouse. And I’m not talking about some breakup in college, before you’ve even figured out who you are yet. I mean something that will hit you after you’ve come to believe the world is solid under your feet, thought you knew the shape of your life. It’s like if one morning the sun just didn’t rise. For me, it was Freya dying of cancer. Not just the death, but the original misdiagnosis, the year of fighting, the periods of false hope, the mistakes I made that may have cost both of us everything. After that day, after that red gash across the timeline, you look at your old photos and see a stranger looking back. Your mind gets pulled in so many directions that it loses its shape, becomes something unrecognizable. Monstrous.”

For my mother, who gave everything to everyone