The bar was worse than shitty. Shitty had character. The place was generic. Fake stone meant to echo a tunnel on Ceres or Pallas marked with graffiti to make it look edgy until you noticed that the pattern of it repeated every couple meters. The appearance of counterculture as churned out by a corporate designer.
pen name of SF writing duo Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck
“We’re all here for our own reasons,” Naomi said. “What they are isn’t as important as the fact that we came.”
“True,” Emma said.
Naomi laughed, and it was a hard, bitter sound. “Anyway, I spent too much time already with people telling me they’d shoot me if I didn’t do what they said. That tank’s empty for this lifetime.”
“May it never refill,” Emma said.
Easy to make rules," Emma said. "Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it's the person's fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that's worth shit, we've done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they'd work perfectly if it were only a different species.
You sound like someone I know," Naomi said.
I'll die for that," Emma said. "I'll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy.
I feel stupid," she said. "I really thought we were a scientific mission.
Aren't we?
She pointed one thumb toward the monitor. "That's not science. 'Light shit on fire and see what happens' isn't science. This is throwing dynamite into a pond to see if any fish float to the top.
So…natural philosophy?
Military bullshit. Solving every problem by trying to blow it up.
How to achieve a more robust homeostasis. Just because it's difficult to do doesn't make the principal science unsolvable.
So not unnatural at all," Holden said, tipping a little more wine from the bottle into the doctor's glass.
Meaningless term," Cortázar said. "Humans arose inside nature. We're natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective.
So if we get to a place that we can all live forever, that's not unnatural? Holden sounded genuinely curious.
Cortázar leaned in toward the prisoner, gesturing with his left hand while he swirled his glass in his right. "The only limits on us are what we can do. It's perfectly natural to seek personal benefit. It's perfectly natural to give advantages to your own offspring and withhold them from others. It's perfectly natural to kill your enemies. That's not even outlier behavior. That's all in the middle of the bell curve all the time.
I don't know what the win look like.
Well, for me, it looks like dying with the knowledge that humanity's a little bit better off than it would have been if I'd never been born. A little freer. A little kinder. A little smarter. That the bullies and bastards and sadists got their teeth into a few less people because of me. That's got to be enough.