Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1)

by Edward Ashton

My standard stipend gave me enough to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what it was all for. I couldn’t think of a single way the universe would be different if I stepped off of my balcony one morning. And so, like bored young men throughout history, I spent an unfortunate amount of my time finding ways to get myself into trouble.

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.

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.

According to this piece, though, the stated casus belli was the question of whether a native corvid-like avian species was sentient, and therefore deserving of protection and respect, or delicious, and therefore deserving of a spicy dry rub and an hour on the grill.

I’m not the most sensitive person, but I’ve been alive long enough to figure out that telling a miserable person about how much worse things could be is usually a bad idea.

once had a fun conversation with him about the parallels between the Diaspora and the original spread of the human species out of Africa on old Earth. Most of his opinions were wrong, but I had a good time telling him exactly why that was so.

It’s a truism that every new technological advancement in human history has been applied first to advance the interests of the horny.

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.