Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1)

by Edward Ashton

There’s no such thing as a perfect friend, any more than there’s any such thing as a perfect anything, and if you slag everyone in your life for their many and varied failings, you’re going to miss appreciating the good stuff they bring to the table.

I added up the benefits of having him in my life, deducted the annoyance of having to pay for everything anytime we went anywhere, and decided that on the balance, he was a net positive. Once I’d made that decision, I quit worrying about the checks. It wasn’t worth it.

There are at least thirty people here, gathered in groups of three or four, leaning over their tables, heads close together, and talking in low voices. Five deaths in one day is a scary thing on a beachhead colony, and we’re mostly engaged in the ancient human custom of telling one another what idiots the recently deceased were, in order to convince ourselves that what happened to them can’t possibly happen to us.

The next two hours are weird. I don’t think I want to talk about them. Just to be clear, though: I regret nothing.

It’s a truism that every new technological advancement in human history has been applied first to advance the interests of the horny. The printing press? Some Bibles, mostly porn. Antibiotics? Perfect for treating STIs.

The second area where every new technology is applied, of course, is war.

The best explanation I’ve seen is that the entire reason humans wound up developing spears and houses and flitters and starships is that we were lousy at being regular animals.