Most of us have simple passions at the core of who we are. Those passions might change over time, but at any one moment, I feel like there’s a striving inside us that frames our decisions. The shame is that most people never ask themselves what their passions are, much less look deep into others. They just do whatever feels right at any one moment,

The races I study still employ their immune systems, and the parallels between those systems and us as a race are striking. For we have become what Earthlings would call white blood cells. We remove foreign bodies from the cosmos. And every one leaves an imprint, a bauble of tech or a new idea, all of which we neatly coil into our lives, into our molecular structure. We are an immune system, and we are immune to death. This last, alas, is our curse.

There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop. Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes. I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins: In the event of damage to the building… So it goes.

Time slipped away in a familiar manner, and love dwindled as it was tossed back and forth in the form of arguments. It could only go away, everything she saw and everywhere she looked. Money. It disappeared from her accounts no matter how hard she tried to save. Time and love and wealth and anything worth building or wrapping one’s arms around, trying to hold on to it all, eroding like the cascade of sand between two palms, stolen by the breeze.

All our hope, the accomplishments of those before us, what the world can be like, that’s our Legacy.” Bernard’s lips broke into a smile. He waved his hand to continue. “And the bad things that can’t be stopped, the mistakes that got us here, that’s the past.

We are the seeds,” he said. “This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times........But it won’t work.” He shook his head, then sat back on the floor and peered at the pictures in the massive book. “You can’t leave seeds this long,” he said. “Not in the dark like this. Nope......What do seeds do when they’re left too long?” she asked him.
He frowned.
“We rot,” he said. “All of us. We go bad down here, and we rot so deep that we won’t grow anymore.” He blinked and looked up at her. “We’ll never grow again.

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