The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

This was about looking and seeing. Pure data. You don’t believe data—you test data.” He grimaced. “If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.”

“And they think that because they have faith, they can wish the world to be anything they want it to be.

“There’s a theory that if we don’t have the right words in our vocabularies, we can’t even see the things that are right in front of our faces. If we can’t describe our reality accurately, we can’t see it. Not the other way around. So someone says a word like Mexico or the United States, and maybe that word keeps us from even seeing what’s right in front of us. Our own words make us blind.”

Everything died. Places were blown away, or drowned or burned, and it just kept happening. The equilibrium of the world was shifting. Whole cities were losing their balance as the ground they’d taken for bedrock shifted beneath them and knocked them right on their collective asses.

Lucy felt sick, listening to him. It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn’t really argue.

They have no idea what they’re doing. These are the people who are supposed to be pulling all the strings, and they’re making it up as they go along.