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Benji didn’t hate this new world. It was peaceful in a way he’d never really experienced before. No machinery. No gunfire. No fireworks, no traffic, no car horns honking, no dirt bikes, no helicopters overhead, no leaf blowers next door, no sirens, no nine to five, no cellphone ringing, no Twitter, no Facebook, no TikTok, no email, no spam calls, no junk mail, no meetings, none of it. There was only stillness. And there was solace in that stillness. Was it better for the world that humankind had been shaken from it like so many fleas?
“I don’t know if you saw the world that I did, Benji, but what I saw was, even before White Mask, a mad place. I don’t just mean the baser instinct stuff—the bigotry and bullying. I mean, chaos. Delusion. Stupidity. People rejected science for dangerous fantasy. All for money, for power—or worse, to sit at the feet of rich and powerful men. And their impact on the natural world? A literal atrocity.
That’s people. I got mine, you can’t have any of it, and if you even look at me sideways I’ll put a bullet in you.”
There was always someone like that out there, ready to ride their hate like a horse and gallop right over anybody who wasn’t like them, who had what they wanted. Someone always wanted to bathe in blood. Because hate like that didn’t stay quiet.
“When we’re good to each other, the world is good, Marcy. It’s as simple as a sunset. We help them, they help us. If we can’t live like that, then what’s the point of living at all?”
Wasn’t that always the conspiracy theory about Exxon? Everyone always said they’d figured out how to power a car on water alone, and then they patented it and locked it away so that it would delay any transition from that sweet, sweet black gold.
He said those guys were all tatted up, too, you know—about what you’d expect. Swastikas and lightning, hammers and swords. All that Nazi crap. Creel’s leftovers, I guess.” She grunted. “Punks who don’t want to share the world with anybody who doesn’t look like them. Not then, and not now.
Those who were left would be worse. They’d be people who felt like all this made sense. That this was a world not of community, but a world of terror—they’d see themselves as predators in a place of limited prey.
He had few papers in front of him. He didn’t like to read. Reading was for suckers.
They were already convinced of both their exceptionalism and the God-given right of their individual liberties, so it was simple enough to tell them that they shouldn’t have to give up anything, not one goddamn little thing, in order to fight this pandemic. And white Americans were bigoted as hell, too, so all you had to tell them was that the Chinese invented the fungus, that Mexicans were bringing it in, that the Blacks were gonna steal from them when the world went to shit, and that the Jews were bankrolling the whole goddamn thing.
The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. — John Milton, Paradise Lost
“I once thought, how can anyone be depressed?
So that meant depression was a failing of some kind—a failure to see the good in all things.” He chewed on his lip. “Now, though, I think: How can you not be depressed? I’m not dead, but I feel like I died.
We didn’t lose. We gave up. —tattered banner hanging beneath the Golden Gate Bridge
This, Benji thought, feels normal. All these people. Their voices. Their ideas. The hum of generators. The smell of food cooking. Even the strings of electric lights buzzing, each bulb a bright star of defiance against darkness both real and imagined. This was the Harvest of the Future Festival.
for that, she was grudgingly thankful. Only recently had she begun to see the potential for a new world, a new nation. One of true democracy and equity. As long as they didn’t screw it all up. She remained optimistic. But only barely. And it was impossible not to see the hard truth that it took an apocalypse to even give them a shot at getting things right.
Ouray was a chance to start over, to get right what they got wrong: to make a world to keep, and not one to throw away.
He smiled to everyone, was friendly. But inside he felt a crushing sadness, the sadness of one who remains. He persisted. But sometimes he wondered why.
This place was a buffet of new experiences, and yes, life would be difficult here, but he bought the ticket, now he wanted to take the ride. And he hoped others wanted to take his ride, too.
DESTINY IS JUST ANOTHER NAME FOR DESCENT
Life presented moments and events that felt like falling, Benji knew. Moments where the path collapsed beneath your feet and you tumbled into a pit, no roots or rocks to grab hold of. So you fell because you had to fall. The descent, irreversible. This felt like one of those times.
As they walked down the street, he saw faces watching them from windows. People he counted as neighbors, even friends, just days ago. And he now worried those same people were…What? Conspirators? Enemies?
I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another. —Madeline Miller, Circe
He was healthy and chubby, and as his eyes seemed to find her and Benji instead of the mobile, he brightened and gurgled. It broke her heart, then mended it, then broke it all over again.
I’m leaving. I’m getting free of this. I won’t fall prey to foolish men and their bad beliefs again.
He noticed things that other people did not. It’s why some called them the disease detectives, because they were keen to seek out clues. They trained themselves to find them, and not always with one’s conscious mind. It was less the willful act of looking and more the passive act of seeing.
“I can appeal to God—” “You’ll have to, because I can’t promise you’ll survive whatever is to come. Because they don’t care about your god, or mine.” This last part pained him to say. “They have their god, now.” “It has them,” Shana said, her words forming a dire warning. And, Benji feared, a dire truth.
“I didn’t mean to kill them, Benji. I didn’t. I’m not a killer.” Benji grappled with that sentiment. Because, quite literally, Matthew was. But so was he. So were so many of them now. The deeper question became, did their actions dictate that identity? Could they be good people still?
…All the sadness in the world is right in the eyes of a dog. —George Carlin
was it? He’d always lived life by a few simple rules and one of those rules was, if you felt a situation was wrong or starting to go wrong, you had to get out of that situation immediately.
Turned out, there had been a rash of ransom operations running from cabs expertly (and falsely) marked as safe city taxis. Jumping out was smart, even if it hurt. The busted elbow was better than what could’ve happened. And now, he was forced to make a similar calculation. What happened last night was not okay. Something had broken in this place, or had been broken all along. He failed to see it, and now they were in danger.
It’s like a broken mirror, this country. Shattered all over the ground. Some shards, they’ll show you something pretty: the sun, a smiling face, a bird above. Some of those pieces are pointed in the wrong direction, and all you see in them is something ugly.”
Idly, she thought about Mayor Cruz calling this place New America. She liked it. But wondered if America was even a place worth saving anymore. It had sure showed its ugly side, hadn’t it?
I think good rock’n’roll has always had this ability to be transcendent. A song might be about losing your gal or whatever other misfortune has come your way…but the best stuff takes your hand and helps you dance through the apocalypse. I’d like to think that’s what we’re trying to do. —Mike Dirnt, bassist for Green Day
At that, she laughed a little. It was dark. Real dark. But sometimes dark was funny for reasons that didn’t make sense. Like farting at a funeral. You just weren’t supposed to do it but people did it and so that made it funny.
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question “How can we eat?” the second by the question “Why do we eat?” and the third by the question “Where shall we have lunch?” —Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Her face mirrored what he was feeling: There shined a mad combination of abject panic and hopeful desperation. The need to connect with other human beings contrasted with the absolute fear of other human beings.
BOOKS ARE A UNIQUELY PORTABLE MAGIC, Stephen King.
“The rules of the state aren’t automatically moral because they’re rules. Right and wrong doesn’t come from a lawbook or a courtroom. You don’t have to just go along with it.”
There was…I don’t know, an infection, but not? Something was growing out of her. Hairs, but not hairs. Like metal threads—” The golden retriever whined and rested its head on Matthew’s knee. He stopped talking and looked up at Marcy. “You think I’m nuts.” “I dunno, Matthew. This is pretty weird stuff.” “Says the sheriff of a town governed by a godlike computer swarm.”
it wasn’t love, not exactly, but adoration. It was the first time he saw it clearly, that he could win. And if he couldn’t win the normal way, he could force victory. They would do that for him, could do it, and ultimately did do it. They killed Nora Hunt to grant him the presidency. He knew those people would follow him into Hell without blinking twice. He could get them to shoot their kids in the head and jump into a fucking volcano, all in the name of Ed Creel, Jesus Christ, and the superior white race.
But the world goes to hell in high heels, you start to re-evaluate things. You start to think, I got this moment right here. I don’t have yesterday, and no promise of tomorrow. I have this moment stuck between all the other moments, so I might as well live here instead of in a day that’s gone, or a day that might never come.”
For the world to progress, for it to heal, we must see clear to both of those things. Our service and our purpose must be two circles perfectly overlapping. What we give to the world must be the work that defines us. Meaning we give ourselves to the world to make it better. We don’t just work to work.
Until we disentangle fundamental needs and rights from someone’s ability to charge us for it, capitalism will continue to throw us over the cliff’s edge. This is how the world ends: not with a bang, but a ka-ching. —Afzad Kerman in his TED Talk, “Chaos and Crisis: The Accidental Ingenuity of the Almost-Apocalypse”
This idea that somehow Black Swan—a predictive intelligence built as a quantum computer—had received communication from itself in the future, a future where mankind had been wholly eradicated by a fungal pathogen that began like white-nose syndrome in bats? It was truly, spectacularly deranged. But Bill was bullish on it. Said, “It’s possible. Quantum entanglement is a helluva thing, Moira. Time and space are not hard limits on that entanglement.”
I said it before and I’ll say it again: I loved you when I met you, I love you now, and I love you in the future tense. Even gone from this world, I will love you, and I want that love to echo back and forth through time, till it finds you in every moment. I want you to remember me from tonight. I felt clear tonight. I felt good. (The wine didn’t hurt.) It felt good to be with you this last time. I’m sorry it’s like this. But I know if I wait, I’ll do something untoward. And I can’t have that. I can’t have that being the memory of me you keep. Don’t worry about where I’m going. I’ve always
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The mind saw patterns, even when patterns were not there to see. Apophenia.
Give you a broken pattern of a person you know, then let your mind smooth over the rough edges and connect the jagged bits into a uniform whole. A bridge over the uncanny valley.
“So what I’m thinking is, I’m done letting the world cut us down any further. It’s whittled us this far, but now it’s going to go the other way. It’s going to whittle us sharp. Sharper. Whittle us into spear tips, whet us into knife blades.
She felt wary here. Like this was a dangerous place to be, treading the terrain between an artificial intelligence and its burgeoning emotions. It was Scylla and Charybdis in Homer’s Odyssey—on one side, a six-headed sea monster calling a rocky shoal its home, and on the other, a hungry whirlpool. The devil and the deep blue sea.
