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like training a robot that was designed to put cars together how to pat you on the head.
PASTOR STEPHEN liked this
Her heart did a little flip. My dearest!
“I’m just thinking about, um…” Getting fucked by a space monster.
Cora looked down at the guy who was “packing,” and he was pretty easy to spot—a white guy in a denim biker jacket with a big beard, he looked like a half-assed attempt at a biker, a Heck’s Lesser Divine Entity, and he had a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag sprouting up from his vest, flapping in the breeze.
What if he got zapped with his dick out? Maybe that was exactly what they were waiting for, those sick alien fucks.
“Yes,” she stammered, totally blanking. He’s withdrawn, deceptive, duplicitous. He lies. He’s perfectly capable of kindness, but withdraws it when it’s inconvenient for him, and it’s always inconvenient. He doesn’t take care of himself, he lives in constant fear, he refuses to sleep because he’s so afraid. He’s killing himself. He won’t let me help him.
The two looked up at the blinged-out ancient Egyptian edifice of the Cheesecake Factory at the Spectrum in Irvine, its signage emblazoned with red neon bulbs. A gilded monument to overpriced mediocre food, a confused mess of architecture and interior design that was equal parts sarcophagus and Mordor. A hideous calorie-laden monument to man’s hubris.
“No, it took him two weeks to repair the damage. I don’t remember any of it. I know Obelus severed my intestines, large intestine in particular. I got sepsis, blood poisoning. Ampersand’s very good at repairing bodies. Human bodies. But I don’t have any scars, and no way to prove what happened. If you saw…” She grabbed her stomach tighter. “There’s no scarring. You wouldn’t believe me.”
MY BELOVED WILL NOT HARM YOU, DEAR CLEVER CREATURE,” said a different voice in her ear. “YOU ARE MINE.” Kaveh brushed himself off and rose to his feet. “That’s ominous.”
Nikola, for his part, seemed down for whatever. Like, Hey, man, you guys do what you want. I’m just happy to be here.
“It feels like we’re rats on a ship. Rats on the Titanic trying to move the rudder. Even if we did have real power and influence, I don’t think there’s any force on Earth that’s going to change the direction of this ship.” “That might be true. But if this ship is going down, I’d rather go down with it than abandon it.”
And she was powerless to stop it, powerless to change it, powerless to influence anything. She was a rat on a massive ship trying to push the rudder, deluding herself that she could budge it even a millimeter in either direction. This is hopeless. There is no changing the direction of this ship.
It wasn’t just that humanity had built a civilization whose inertia toward its own self-destruction was too strong for it to change. This was a civilization that, in the face of adversity, turned on itself, devoured itself, ate its most vulnerable. Flesh-eaters, pugilists, militarists.
This phase we are about to enter as a civilization may be our last, and already I am staggered at how shortsighted many have become. These fearmongers provoke the anxieties of an already insecure populace not because they have any strategy regarding our survival as a civilization, but because they desire power.
“Hubris will be our end,” he tells me. He does not mean “our” in the collective sense—he means his own civilization. He doesn’t think they will become some grand galactic empire, quite the opposite, in fact; their single-minded fixation on controlling everything they encounter combined with their rejection of the unfamiliar has led to a cultural and technological stagnation, which, he believes, will ultimately lead to their undoing.
