Axiom's End (Noumena, #1)

by Lindsay Ellis

Trying to exert some control over her life was an exercise in futility, so why bother?

The creature was tall, even in a crouch, firmly inhuman, with a shell that shone silvery white in the twilight. Its body leaned forward like a raptor, despite the lack of anything behind it like a tail to balance its center of gravity, with long arms curled in front of it like a praying mantis. It had an oblong head like a dragon, if the dragon had no jaw and no nose, and even had a sort of crest that jutted out from the back of its head like a feather headdress. But it was the eyes that were most striking, the only part of it that wasn’t some shade of that iridescent white silver, big almond-shaped things situated on the sides of its head like a wasp, amber colored and seeming to glow as if there were a dim, internal light illuminating a gemstone, and those eyes were focused on her.

Black olives. The answer to the eternal quandary of what if one were to combine snails and old tires into a foodstuff. The only way the creature could have punished her more brutally was if it had forced celery on her.

the doing of deeds that even need to be hidden in the first place—that is our sickness.

Cora gulped down the last bit of pancake, already starting to ache from having very rapidly eaten the whole plate. The whole plate.

The whole plate LMFAO

“But after all this”—Cora gestured to the group of aliens not fifty feet away from them—“why do they even want to keep this a secret?” “Because they’re covering their asses,” said Luciana. “They don’t want a huge lie and a metric fuckton of stupid mistakes to be made public. We’re heading into an election year. They’d rather just put off the consequences if it means not having to deal with them now.” Cora looked again at the twenty-eight odd existential alterations to the very fabric of the reality standing right in front of her. An election year? A goddamn election year? Who gives a shit!?

Truth is a human right,’”

“They represent your own government,” he said. “Why are you afraid of your own government?”

The secretary was trying to keep his gaze on Ampersand, not Cora. “Here in America, we consider ourselves created equal. We stand on equal ground.” “Categorically untrue.” “He says he feels that’s dishonest,” said Cora flatly.

‘The human fascination with intelligent exoterran species focuses on their similarity to humans. Humanity is not prepared for any cultural, biological, or ideological disparities it may encounter. No species is.

One species is only comprehensible to another species as it understands itself. But with all species, there are attributes one possesses that the other does not share. Where attributes are not shared, inevitably both parties will try to shape the other into a form they can understand.’”

We understand each other only insofar as we understand ourselves.’”

There was a certain pain that came with thinking about Nils; hating him blindly was so much easier than admitting that she was lonely, and lost, and out of her depth, and she needed her father, and she missed him. In any case, he wasn’t going to change, and he wasn’t coming back.

Declaring that he only ever had the nation’s best interest in mind, Mr. Bush laments his role in the cover-up and professed a hope that the government can regain the trust of its people. But “as president, I must put the interests of America first,” he said.

Why did people believe and propagate conspiracy theories? Why was this on the rise? She didn’t know, exactly. Yes, the specifics of conspiracy theories were always wrong, but it was in response to a genuine distrust of authority, and a search for alternative explanations wasn’t completely baseless. After all, maybe the conspiracy theorists had been wrong about almost every single detail with regard to the alien presence on Earth, but they hadn’t been wrong about the presence itself.

There was certainly something appealing about a death date; one chooses exactly how long one lives, and one knows exactly when one will die.

Unus Annus Memento mori

“Opposing genocide is a defect?” “Any viewpoint that might place the lives of aliens at equal value to that of our own was considered a defect. Therefore, in the interest of finishing the transient genocide, the Fremdan population must be purged.”

“Because it offers little opportunity to strategize. It is mostly a game of chance.” “The same could be said about life,” offered Cora. “Yes,” he said. “That is why I don’t like it.”

as she reached into the ether to try to find accurate words that translated the meaning of the music, she came up short.

An axiom developed that planets that support life are so competitive and dangerous that advanced civilizations can never evolve, and advancements such as ours are unlikely to the point of impossibility.

“You are the civilization that disproves this axiom. You would be both the greatest discovery in the history of the Superorganism and the greatest threat to its conception of itself as divinely unique.”

“Empathy and ethics, in a time of great suffering, have a way of being pushed to the side in the interest of survival.

“Trauma can cause cognitive impairment in all sapient species.”

“You were right,” she said. “About us only being able to understand each other through the prism of our own existence. I want to be able to put you in the right context. The context of your species, of your history. But I can’t help but apply human morality to you.” “Not just human morality. A fast-changing brand of morality, unique to this time, place, and culture. It will be a different morality a day from now. A year from now.”

I may design a pandemic for the humans as well. Their advancement must slow. It would be cruel to allow them to continue at this pace.]

Yikes. I know this was written well before our current situation, but yikes nonetheless

Most of all, deepest thanks to President Ronald Reagan, who deregulated the hell out of children’s television programming in the early 1980s (among many other things), and without whom Transformers would not exist.