Pines: Wayward Pines: 1 (The Wayward Pines Trilogy)

by Blake Crouch

Their core group of friends—now responsible, tame professionals—had once upon a time been wild and prone to excess, and on the drive home, they’d all vowed to tie one on in Ethan’s honor.

You are familiar with the saying ‘a death by a thousand cuts’?” Aashif holds up a single razor blade that gleams under the lightbulb. “It comes from a Chinese execution method, abolished in 1905, called lingchi, translated also as ‘slow slicing’ or ‘the lingering death.’

“Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.

In trashing our world, we forced our own transformation into a descendant species from Homo sapiens that adapted, through natural selection, to survive the destruction of human civilization.

“The people in town, for the most part, can’t handle the truth of what’s out there. But you…you can’t handle the lie. The not knowing.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. To the earth…a million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. —Michael Crichton