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Protecting ourselves from abuses does not mean we should open the door for the abuse of others,
This one was called something like … National … Security … Intelligence Force for Who Gives a Shit? She was so tired.
We will find a way to make you safe, and then we’ll make it better.
“How can you tell?” Sol tipped his aviators down to look at her as if she had asked him an insultingly simple question, like if he knew where Canada was.
what the pluperfect passive subjunctive fuck
In Kaveh Mazandarani’s inner struggle between self-preservation and curiosity, a struggle that occurred more often for him than it did for most people, curiosity was fated to win every time.
“So now that I’ve told you who I am,” he said, “do you think maybe you could tell me … what the fuck?”
“The paradox of anti-government hysteria is it tends to lead to authoritarianism. The arrival of space aliens has not united humanity; they’ve only made us more tribal, more fractured, and it’s only going to get worse in the months and years to come. And now you have these proto-fascists arguing against the very idea of alien personhood and advocating for the creation of a whole different category of person altogether. One might almost say … three-fifths of a person.”
“It’s about us. It’s about how we treat our aliens, our lower classes. If they create a whole new class of person with fewer rights than a natural person, one created specifically for a nonhuman alien, how long do you think it will be before they start applying that to human aliens as well?”
Operation: Probably a Huge Mistake but Fuck It began as most huge mistakes do: with a trip to Wal-Mart.
“Assigning gender to pronouns is just as logical as assigning race or height or any other physical attribute to them, and just as relevant to me.”
“I left a perfectly good ‘that’s what she said’ hanging. Right there. And you didn’t take it.” She stared at him blankly. “This is serious.” “So is a good ‘that’s what she said’ left un-she-said’d. Tsk, tsk.”
“I CAN SHOW YOU THE TRUTH OF THE DIVINE, THE TRUTH OF WHY WE ARE HERE, THE TRUTH OF THE ORIGINS OF ALL LIFE. WHAT BINDS YOU TOGETHER.”
how to gracefully telegraph that she wasn’t only interested in girls?
“WE CANNOT KNOW HOW FAR THE UNKNOWN UNIVERSE GOES. FOR YOU SEE, LITTLE COUSIN, WE EXIST ONLY IN A POCKET OF THIS UNIVERSE, AND BOTH OF US, HUMAN AND AMYGDALINE, FACE THE SAME LIMITATIONS. THIS IS THE FIRST THING I NEED FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND. IN THIS METAPHOR, ONLY THIS FLAT IS KNOWABLE. ANYTHING BEYOND IT IS NOT KNOWABLE, BECAUSE WE ARE CONFINED TO THIS DIMENSION OF SPACE-TIME AND CANNOT BREAK FREE OF IT.
“THERE IS A PART OF THE BRAIN THAT LIVES AND VIBRATES OUTSIDE THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, A PART TIED IN WITH WHAT YOU MIGHT CALL A SUBCONSCIOUS, WHERE THE BRAIN GREETS BUT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THE UNKNOWN. THEREFORE, THE BRAIN CREATES FORMS IT UNDERSTANDS FOR THIS UNKNOWN—THIS IS THE DIVINE. THIS IS WHERE RELIGION COMES FROM, BOTH FOR OUR ANCESTORS AND FOR YOU. IT IS THE BRAIN GIVING A FORM TO THAT WHICH IT KNOWS TO BE TRUE BUT CANNOT COMPREHEND.
The “dead dove, do not eat” of first-contact scenarios. Well, he thought, I don’t know what I expected.
“And I had never felt such an intense desire to submit to another being. I was lost, steward to a group that despised me, and I wanted nothing more in that moment than to say, ‘Yes, I will submit to you. I am tired, and I am afraid. I will do anything you ask, only please protect me. Protect me from the horrors of your planet. Protect me from the cruelty and callousness of my kind.’
well. that hurts
“I want to go home,” he said, and the wall between them practically burst, a flood of grief flowing through him and into her, crashing into her so hard it felt like her sternum might crack under the pressure. “I want to go home. I want to go home.”
ouch
but the cameraman miraculously survived.
“BUT IF YOU HAD ASSUMED YOU WOULD NOT SEE ANY RESPONSE FROM THE SUPERORGANISM IN YOUR LIFETIME, YOU WERE WRONG. THEY KNOW. THEY KNOW EVERYTHING. THEY ARE COMING.”
Just remember, if you hear gunshots, that means it hasn’t hit you yet, because bullets travel faster than the speed of sound. So if you hear the shot, that bullet hasn’t killed you.”
GOING TO SOB AND CRY MYSELF TO SLEEP OVER THIS ONE
“Don’t make me beat the shit out of you, you fucking nerd,” said Kaplan,
Is this just a function of human nature? he wondered. Is this just something we do, over and over—we identify patterns, we identify problems, and we tell ourselves that we’ve figured it out. We tell ourselves that next time it will be different, next time we will know better, next time we won’t make the same mistake. But then we do.
“Besides, what’s the point of having a rich boyfriend if you don’t get to skip the line sometimes?”
“Besides, we’re gonna be like … Adam and Eve in spaaaaaaace.”
“I DID NOT ASK FOR A QUALIFIED HUMAN. PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATION IS IRRELEVANT TO ME. I ASKED FOR YOU. YOU ARE MY CONDITION.”
me and who
I DO NOT WANT TO REBUILD HUMAN CIVILIZATION WITHOUT YOU IN IT. YOU ARE MY CONDITION.”
“I haven’t seen a Broadway show since I was in high school.” “Was it Cats?” “How did you know?” “It’s always Cats.” He laughed. “Don’t worry. It closed years ago. Cats can’t hurt you anymore.”
Again, gunfire. One, two, three shots. There was a fourth shot, but Kaveh did not hear it.
goodbye
In some ways, they are in America for the same reason I am. The same reason so many of our ancestors came to this country.
liberal democracies and democratic norms are easily exploited when populists capitalize on mass fear for political gain, when they position a fearful majority into an “us” opposed to a nebulous, terrible “them.”
In that way, America is synecdoche for humanity as a whole—capable of such feats of wonder, such innovation, such compassion, but also such greed, such exploitation, such consumption, such empire, and such cruelty. Are these truly traits of our shared human nature? Is this an inexorable, inescapable state of our being? Or is this all the result of a shared construct that we have erroneously agreed is a necessary evil of civilization, a fiction agreed upon, one that might be changed?
I respond to him thus: “Hubris might be our end, too.”
