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After years of escalating tension, the idiots had finally gone and done it. This wasn’t going to be limited to a tactical exchange—they were going for full-throttle Armageddon. “What triggered it?” “The British Prime Minister made a joke about pressing the button. He didn’t realise his mike was hot.”
The cat looked back at me. “I worry. I want you to be okay. You’re one of the least intolerable humans I’ve ever met.”
“Honey, it’s okay to feel scared and upset now and again. We’re all the same on the inside. We’re all just kids in adult bodies. Everybody feels frightened and alone most of the time, and nobody knows shit about anything; we’re all just winging it the best we can.”
Rain and grit blew like static through their headlight beams. They kept their heads down, concentrating on keeping their footing. Chatter was at a minimum. No one wanted to stumble and fall in a pressure suit.
“That kind of thing only happens in movies. Honestly, if you’re a civilisation stupid enough to wire your nuclear arsenal to an emergent neural net, you deserve everything you get. And besides, I’m not picking up any trace of residual radiation in the soil.”
Even if we were a menace to our own world, there was something about us worth saving. We might be destructive children, but our discovery of wormholes hinted at the potential for a useful adulthood somewhere down the line. We just had to grow up first.
As a species with a history as turbulent as ours, it amazed me to realise that as individuals, we were still so afraid of change.
“When you have ghostly ships piloted by dead navigators, I think the word, ‘fucked’ pretty much covers it.”
“Other ships would think me peculiar if they knew. They prefer to put their faith in high-tech instrumentation rather than greasy and unreliable human biology.” “They have no poetry in their souls.” “That, they do not.” He smiled sadly. “Also, no souls.”
When Eryn saw the helmet camera footage, something changed in her head. Through our link, I felt part of her harden. Her grief raged inside her, but she kept it confined, refusing to let it overwhelm her for Maddie’s sake. Instead, I guess she treated it the same way I treated my fusion reactor: as a dangerous, bottled-up fire she could tap for the energy she needed to keep moving forward. She would never be entirely the same. And consequently, neither would I.
Yes, we still needed cops. There were no cameras inside private cabins. The arks left the formulation and enforcement of law to the humans aboard each individual ark. Different arks had different laws and restrictions, and it was up to humanity to police itself. The arks weren’t here to make us behave; they were only interested in keeping us safe as a species—and keeping the rest of the universe safe from us.
“I’ve had enough,” I said to the ship. “We’ve spent all this time reacting when we should have been acting.” “What do you suggest?” “I don’t know. But being thrown out of an airship seems to have jarred something loose. I’m feeling crisper and more clear-headed than I have in days. And I’m absolutely fucking furious. Whatever this infection is, it killed my sister and trashed my home—and now it thinks it can take down the entire human race? Not if I have anything to say about it. I want some answers, and I want to protect Madison, and I don’t give a shit who I’m going to have to go through in
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Fucking capitalism. I’d never got my head around it. As far as I could understand, it was a scam to keep you working all your life for the chance to maybe die in comfortable surroundings at the end.
I quickly learned not to talk politics with her, though. She was a firm Dissenter and a staunch supporter of succession, arguing that the Dissent should be free to leave the Continuance and build their own society, rather than being pressganged into what she called, ‘Godless space communism’.
In comparison, human beings were an ephemeral flicker, barely registering on the cosmic clock. To us, the stars were almost static; to them, an eternal fiery sleet.
they found dead worlds. Some of those empty worlds were the result of natural processes—volcanism, asteroid impact, nearby supernovae, gradual loss of atmosphere—but others were unmistakably the result of a dominant species destroying its own habitat. When intelligence arose, it tended to ransack its world for resources; and by the time it realised the effect its depredations were having on the climate and biodiversity of its home planet, it was often too late to reverse the damage.
If any weird and fucked-up-looking thing came at me, I intended to incinerate the hell out of it before it got close enough to touch. Because guardian angel or not, sometimes a girl just needs a huge flamethrower to burn the shit out of anything that messes with her.
“We’re all lost in the night,” I said. I opened my hand and let the pebble roll from my fingers. It hit the tiles and skittered into the water. “But some of us are more thoroughly lost than others.”
