Cold Facts

Speculative science fiction, with apologies to H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Twilight Zone.

The helicopter’s windshield blocked the falling snow, but I squinted anyway

It would have been better to investigate in the coming Southern summer. Even in October, even in the relatively mild climates of Ellsworth Land, Antarctica was no place for a tourist, and my expedition had been rushed. But these discomforts would a small price to pay: the cost of being the first.

The first! The first to see with eyes what I had seen already in data: an anomaly in eight hundred and forty-two gigabytes of autonomous drone surveys spanning the continent. The first to see what others would come to see, if given any delay. Others had looked at the data, had noticed an oddity: only I had seen it for what it was.

No surprise that they’d missed it. Few climatologists studying the slow thawing of the Antarctic continent would have recognized the significance of a concentration of osmium and iridium on the Earth’s surface, and the survey data wasn’t public for another two months. Once it was, any geologist who looked would know something unusual was going on, and they’d come to investigate.

What they’d be looking for, what I’d looked for, was an asteroid impact. Osmium and iridium, like many other metals rare on Earth, bound tightly to iron during the planet’s formation. Iron, in turn, had carried them to the core of the molten young Earth, far away from the thin crust where humans could get at it. But in asteroids, both metals remained common, making them a useful signal for past impacts when found on the surface.

But I hadn’t found an asteroid. No, I’d found something much more interesting. Not a region of similar metals, not a messy deposit left by some ancient lava flow from deep in the mantle, valuable as those might have been.

What I had found was an X. An unmistakable symbol of intentional design, straight and clear, cutting across a dozen layers of geological history in ways no natural dike would. A sign impossible to miss when plotted on a map and looked at closely enough. At the center of that X, where its spokes tapered to thin points, topography surveys showed a small “hill” that was too perfect, too smooth, to be a coincidence. Elsewhere, I might have dismissed it as an old lava dome, but here?

Still. No scientist wants to be the girl who cried ‘aliens’. And even fewer scientists want to think about how major governments might react if they knew about such a find. I needed to be sure, and then I needed to be as public as possible, if I wanted this to go well for me. I had been given a gift, and I was determined to be sure it was given to all mankind.

And so here I was, flying low over nameless mountains bathed on one side in the light of the low-hanging Antarctic sun. A dangerous expedition to undertake alone, especially without anyone but the grey-market crew I’d hired to get me here knowing where I was, but that was what was needed. With the luck befitting someone who had stumbled onto such a find, I had experience as a pilot, enough to avoid involving anyone else at some moderate risk to myself. Of those who knew who I was, only my husband, Alex, had any idea where I was. To everyone else I knew, I was on sabbatical in Norway.

Only a few more ridges until the X on my map, this one drawn by me and not by some greater intelligence. Along with the map, I’d brought a few other things: enough food for a stay of six to eight weeks, in case conditions didn’t permit taking off again or I needed more time; a laboratory spectrograph, on the logic that if chemical signals had brought me here it might be useful to read them if need be; a small generator and loads of fuel, for warmth and power; a satellite phone, its batteries removed to avoid any possible tracking unless absolutely required; and a few books on semiotics that I’d borrowed from a friend in the anthropology department. Water I could distill from the snow easily enough, and the helicopter or whatever structure I might find would provide shelter.

I could feel excitement build in my chest as I neared the last ridge. I’d never been an easily excitable woman, but this was a different matter entirely. This might, I thought, be the single most important moment in all of human history. Then I crossed the ridge, and there was no might about it: this was the single most important moment in all of human history.

I climbed gently out of the helicopter, testing my footing on the ice. The helicopter’s rotors had blown away much of the freshly-fallen snow, but a more compacted coat of ice still covered most of the stone beneath. I found it solid enough to get my first ground-level look at the valley.

It was a good site for a place you wanted to lie undisturbed for decades. A long, flat ridge ran down the center, with ice-filled depressions on either side. Glacial “rivers” of ice ran down each depression, draining any snow that fell on the central ridge. Mountains on either side were steep and rocky enough that no explorer on the ground would have come this way. The rock below was stable and strong, with faults well to either side, at least if the data I could find was to be believed. Something placed here wouldn’t last forever, but it would survive most of mankind’s works.

And something — the something I came to find — was placed here. The dome was not very large, perhaps the size of a small office building, but upward from it extended numerous thin metal bars forming spokes with the dome at their center: another signal, perhaps, to guide a visitor to it if it were buried in the snow. They had been too small to see in satellite imagery, but from up close and with the sun at the right angle, it was clear that they extended a very long way in each direction. Shining lines extended over the glacier valleys, down the central ridge, and into and over the towering mountains on each side.

I unloaded my gear, one of the books, and enough supplies for a day, then moved gingerly across the ice towards the dome, looking carefully around as I did so. There was no guarantee the place was safe and, although that was not going to stop me from investigating it, there was no harm in a little caution. But I found nothing of interest: all was quiet. Even my breath seemed to echo, and the only other sound was the gentle whisper of the icy winds.

The base of the dome was lightly covered by the snow, but as I approached it became clear that an overhang ran around its circumference, sheltering a thin alcove in a ring around the dome. On the windward side, where I had landed, this alcove had mostly filled with blowing snow, but all of it seemed fresh, so the alcoves were probably kept clear by some means over the long term. So, I reasoned, the other side would probably be clear.

As I walked around the dome’s periphery, I got a better look at its construction. Metal, mostly, but an odd greenish alloy that seemed unfamiliar. Perhaps one made with materials not common on Earth, or perhaps one only familiar to someone with more engineering knowledge than myself. Symbols that I did not recognize ran along the overhang: if they were human, they weren’t in any common alphabet.

The leeward side of the dome was, as hoped, much clearer. The metal floor of the alcove was clear and covered in small bumps, clearly designed with traction in mind. I made much more rapid progress circling the dome on that than I had on the ice, and the apparent care put into its design put me at ease. Someone trying to drive off a visitor would probably not be concerned with their ease of movement, or so I hoped.

After ringing around a third of the dome’s circumference, I found what I was looking for: a door, unmistakably a door, alien though it was. It stood tall, around fifteen feet high, with no evident hinges. High on the door, above my line of sight, was a grid of the same symbols I had seen around the periphery of the dome.

At the center of the symbols was a very large button, around the size of a dinner plate. I pressed it, and the dome came to life.

Recesses appeared in the ceiling and on the inner wall of the alcove, and were filled with bright white lights and powerful fans respectively. The fans whirred to life and the lights cast down a strong heat: clearing the snow, I imagined. A circle of smaller white lights appeared on the door with a slowly growing lit dot in the center, but otherwise nothing happened.

I looked around briefly to find some other object of interest until, about a minute later, the fans slowed to a quiet hum and the door slid into the floor to reveal a hallway behind. Mildly stale air met my nose but, I realized, the fans had been ventilating what had until then been a sealed facility. I could breathe without trouble. The hallway was lit by lines of lights along the sides, which grew brighter and dimmer in a way that suggested motion down the hall: a welcome, I hoped, as I took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The lights along the floor led me past several closed doors and ultimately to a single room. It was enormous, perhaps fifty feet square, but bare except for two objects: a screen placed into the wall directly in front of me and, at its feet, a flat glass object with a single very prominent symbol, whose purpose was not clear. The room had some dim light of its own, but a lot of the light came from outside, bouncing off the reflective metal walls.

As I entered, the screen lit up, showing an animation. A humanoid figure that seemed somehow oddly hunched over appeared, as did what was clearly a representation of the glass object at my feet. The humanoid figure drew a symbol, then put it onto the device. After a brief delay, the symbol appeared above the device, at which point the animation repeated with a different symbol. Soon strings of symbols were written and repeated. Finally, an image of me, taken by some unseen camera, was overlaid on the humanoid figure, flashing on and off as though to indicate that it was intended to represent me.

I set my bag down and found one of my notebooks. On it, I wrote the letter ‘A’, then laid it face down onto the device. Nothing happened, so I flipped it face up, and this time an ‘A’ appeared on the screen in front of me. I wrote a ‘B’, and similarly a ‘B’ appeared in front of me, then repeated this with the entire alphabet. I then took out one of the semiotics books I’d brought and placed it on the table, and sure enough a representation of the text appeared on screen. This time it appeared with the same dot-in-circle structure I’d seen on the front door, and the dot grew slightly as the text appeared. I turned the page and showed it more text, at which point the dot grew further. After a dozen more pages, the circle filled and the screen went blank briefly before displaying the same humanoid figure, this time showing much longer strings of text, and a new circle.

For the next twenty minutes or so, I fed the machine the contents of the book until I had a much better idea. I pulled out my laptop, which fortunately contained a dictionary, and wrote a brief macro that would cycle through common words. I turned it on, placed it on the “scanner”, and sat down to wait, watching as the circle slowly filled and the screen repeated each new word almost too fast to see.

I awoke to a beep from my laptop: apparently it had taken a while to run through half the English language. I looked up at the screen, where a filled circle awaited me, along with two colored squares and the text “press green square”. I did so, and the screen was replaced with “press orange circle” and three colored circles. After a few rounds of what I could not help but characterize as alien Simon-says, the screen lit up, this time with full sentences and another circle (which I was coming to understand as a sort of progress bar). It said:

“Hello. This place contains knowledge. I learn to write by reading your words. Show me more words. Then I write better.”

Well. Do what the alien machine says, I thought. I tweaked my macro to cover more of the English language, and then to run through a few ebooks I had saved for the ocean voyage south. This would, I calculated, take most of the “night” (insofar as there was a night at this latitude), so I left my laptop and returned to the helicopter for my other supplies while the scanner ‘read’ what I could feed it. Soon I’d brought in enough to stay for a few days and set up a sort of camp in one corner of the scanner room, and, despite my excitement, I managed to sleep.

I woke up not knowing if I’d slept for minutes or hours — the steady state of the sun near the horizon and the partial light of the room made it hard to tell — but my laptop’s clock told me it had been eight or nine hours. Or, as my laptop was currently measuring time, most of the dictionary and about two and a half pulp novels. It was somehow appropriate, I thought, to introduce an alien device to Earth’s languages through the sort of thing you’d buy at an airport.

The scanner seemed to notice as I paused the program, but in any event, the new circle had filled, and what I assumed was the dome’s computer had developed a rather better grasp of English:

“Hello. This facility is a gift to you and your species from another species.”

I gasped audibly at this, the sound echoing around the room.

“The other species has not visited your planet, but one of its independent ships visited 87,923 years ago. It built this facility, copied its knowledge into it, and left. You should be able to understand this message. If you can understand this message, please state the approximate height, weight, and body shape of a human, including units of measurement, to confirm understanding.”

And, amazingly, a sort of keyboard did appear. It wasn’t laid out like any Earth keyboard would be — it was alphabetical, had separate copies of capital and lowercase letters, and had vowels in a separate group from consonants — but it was filled with recognizable letters of the Latin alphabet. I typed out a brief description of the shape and size both of my own body and of an average human’s.

“This facility understands your writing. The other rooms are now open. Each of them has a label on its door that describes the topics covered by that room’s information. That information will be translated into your language. Use that information to help your species. This facility is not creatively intelligent, but it is programmed with answers to questions and requests. You may ask them at this screen at any time.”

I sat down on my sleeping bag, head spinning. It’s real, I thought. I was right. And now it’s safe from those who would rather bury the truth. And then I realized that head-spinning was wasting valuable alien-knowledge-learning time, and dashed off to the hallway.

Over the next two weeks, I poured through thousands of pages of alien learning, pausing for only brief walks in the chilly Antarctic sun to keep my helicopter clear of snow. I needed little fuel or equipment, as the facility operated under its own power and generated enough warmth to be moderately comfortable. I was not an expert in every field — no living human is — but I hadn’t fed the facility enough technical vocabulary for it to use much jargon anyway (outside of semiotics, a topic I quickly came to regret teaching it and eventually instructed the main console to avoid). The “library”, as I came to call it, was divided into four rooms:

The first detailed the history of the alien race and their facility, which I skimmed but paid little immediate attention to. The aliens resembled something akin to a turtle with tentacles instead of the limbs of an Earth vertebrate. They were large by Earth standards: their central mantle or shell was ten or so feet across, and their tentacles extended some four or five feet beyond that. Each tentacle narrowed to a thin point at its end, which could dexterously bend much like a human finger. There was no mention of distinguished sexes, but children had two parents: my best guess was a sort of hermaphroditism.

They were dull-colored to human eyes, a near-uniform grey-brown, as the atmosphere of their home world had been transparent to wavelengths not visible to humans. But in their own colors, their bodies were brightly patterned, and these patterns could shimmer and shift across their surface — their species’ first form of language. Their senses were reasonably familiar to a human: binocular vision in all directions from six eyes, spaced evenly in a hexagon around their central shell; a chemical sense that the machine translated as smell; a very delicate sense of touch driven by electrical potentials running through their skin. They could not, however, hear, which explained the facility’s tendency to communicate through text.

Their pattern based “word” for themselves had no way to translate neatly into English, and so the console actually asked me for a name for the purposes of presenting its data. I decided to call them Chukwans, after their turtle-like appearance and the Hindu turtle that holds up the world.

The second room contained art and literature. Apparently, they were a peaceful species: nearly all Chukwan imagery focused on a struggle for meaning and purpose in a distant past that I took to be mythological, but no recent works seemed to contain much struggle at all except against external forces. I asked the console for more on this, but such philosophical questions seemed to be beyond its ability to respond. In any event, they seemed to be incredibly cooperative, even eusocial, although they didn’t display any of the hive structure typical of eusocial creatures on Earth. Despite this, one individual credited with bringing peace appeared frequently in the records, having led some sort of an exodus — I came to call “him” Moses after this role.

The third room held all their cosmological knowledge, displayed on a wonderful hologram that filled the room in a way a planetarium could only dream of. Their home planet was not terribly far from Earth, but their initial expansion as a species had gone in the other direction from their homeworld: in towards the center of the galaxy, not out towards its rims. But this information was old: the Chukwans who had sent the probe to Earth were a splinter group, one long out of contact with their original home. That explained ‘Moses’: he was the leader of this group, and they revered him for his teachings (although nothing here mentioned what those teachings actually were).

The fourth and last room held their more practical scientific knowledge: chemistry, biology, mathematics, and physics, although the Chukwans seemed to make little distinction between the four fields and frequently blurred them together. This was of the most interest to me: no doubt that their art and literature would inspire scholarship for decades to come, but it was this knowledge I had come to find. Distributed widely, it could empower the people of Earth to build a new technological paradise; distributed poorly, it could enable an unstoppable empire the likes of which history had never seen.

My education, vast though it was, was not enough to understand everything in front of me. But there was no way to ask for help without tipping my hand — I would have to study it carefully and make my best guess as to how to distribute it to mankind. A risk, but a necessary one.

I started with power generation. I didn’t know exactly how much energy the human race generated, but my memory provided me with a vague enough guess — a few kilowatts or so per person times eight billion people would yield something like thirty or forty terawatts. I asked the console to give a rough estimate of the possible power sustainably generated by the technology it could explain and Earth’s resources. Its answer: ninety-four petawatts, three thousand times my estimate for human civilization. I did my best to understand the technology it offered — some sort of catalyzed fusion, from what I could gather — more directly, but it went well beyond my educated-layperson’s knowledge of physics.

Next came medicine. Some of the literature I’d managed to feed the central console contained descriptions of diseases. The dome’s computer could not tell me if it held the knowledge to cure those diseases, since it did not know enough about Earth’s biochemistry, but it did assure me that similar conditions had afflicted the Chukwans in their past and been eradicated. Disease was unheard of among the Chukwans, even genetic disease, as they apparently had rather advanced gene-editing. Part of the reason for their species’ expansion was a need for new territory in a species with a near-zero death rate.

Mathematics, unfortunately, proved to be well beyond me. I had never been much of an abstract mathematician even when working with structures developed for humans; the Chukwans’ formalism was impossible even after a few days of trying to learn it.

Despite the desperate importance of my visit, I found myself engrossed in everything that the library could teach me. I had work to do, but I also had a scientist’s heart, a heart that found no greater satisfaction than to peer into unrevealed secrets. Between the timeless Antarctic sun outside and the lack of any external time pressure, I found myself keeping days of twenty-six or twenty-seven hours, in which I lost myself in learning until hunger or thirst pushed themselves into my awareness.

It was only after two weeks that I came to realize what was not included in the data before me: weapons. In fact, no intra-species conflict had been mentioned at all among the Chukwan history that I had skimmed, except in the distant past before their exodus. Huh, I thought. Maybe I underestimated how prepared an alien intelligence would be. Maybe the Chukwans had anticipated my fears: after all, it was only sheer dumb luck that had led me to the facility first and not one of the world’s militaries.

I returned to the central console. “Does this facility contain information on weapons or war?” I typed.

“There is no information on devices with the purpose of causing injury in this facility. The Chukwans who built it never intended to cause injury.”

“Never? The history you’ve shown me contains mention of conflicts in the distant past.”

“Correct.”

“What changed?”

“The group that built this facility does not intend to cause injury. Competitive and violent urges have been edited out of their genetics, which are carefully monitored with each new birth. This is one of their central beliefs.”

Alright, I thought, communist hippie aliens. I guess I owe the philosophy department an apology. And yet…

“How do they prevent someone from choosing not to contribute?”

“They don’t. No one chooses not to contribute. They have been engineered not to.”

I should have known then. And maybe I did, at some level. But my optimism got the better of me. Perhaps there was some ethical conundrum to be had here, I thought, but at least if the records were to be believed, membership in this sect was voluntary. This was no Brave New World, it was a utopia of sentience committed to its growth for its own sake, a goal all of its members willingly pursued to the fullest extent of their abilities.

“Why did they build this facility?”

“The highest goal of the group that built this facility is to discover and share knowledge. They believe that knowledge is good and should be shared as much as possible. They built the independent ship that visited Earth with the goal of sharing their knowledge.”

“There’s no other goal?”

“No. They pursue knowledge for its own sake, and share all knowledge they find with as many other species as possible.”

“Aren’t they worried that other species might attack them?

“This facility does not contain an answer to that question.”

I should have known then. I should have listened to the creeping feeling on the back of my neck. But I was a fool, and I went back to the library without further inquiry.

The following weeks passed much like the first two. I read voraciously: at this point, I thought once, just what I can remember would revolutionize science. I saw pictures of faraway worlds, learned algorithms that would make a computer scientist weep, was introduced to the constellations of alien skies. I barely felt the chill of the air outside or the passing of time as I walked through the knowledge of an entire civilization, darting with wonder from one topic to another like a child in a candy shop.

On the third day of my fifth week, I came across a section on terraforming alien worlds. The particular sect of Chukwans that had sent their knowledge to Earth had, apparently, advanced this art to a considerable degree. They could alter the composition of entire atmospheres over the course of a few decades, or divert swarms of comets to add water (as essential to their physiology as to our own) to a barren world. But it was one account in particular that stood out.

This world had been the testing ground for a new technology. Rather than diverting a swarm of comets to add water and melt an ice cap, they’d melt it directly, releasing the water to form oceans and to create a thick, insulating atmosphere to sustain them. The plan was to use a new reaction to release enough energy to melt a piece of ice the size of a continent.

The Chukwans were a methodical people, and the lack of internal competitive politics made it easy to proceed carefully. And it was fortunate that they had: they had known that such a reaction would release an enormous amount of energy, but it was only on a second check that they had realized that it was self-sustaining.

The physics of the rest was beyond me, but from what I could gather, the result would be the complete conversion of any matter present into radiation, which would trigger the same conversion on nearby objects. This reaction would continue in a bubble expanding at the speed of light, converting everything in found into more energy to power its expansion. Their best guess was that the reaction would be self-sustaining in any gas as thick as that filling a galaxy and would, at best, stop only after consuming a galaxy and any of its immediate satellites. At worst, it might be successful in spreading through the galaxy filaments that filled the Universe, consuming everything as it went.

The next section described the reaction in detail, with a helpful note that actually engaging in testing this reaction would probably be a bad idea.

To my horror, the procedure itself was not beyond my understanding. In fact, it required little special engineering at all — just a few very specific, but common, isotopes with a tiny chance to generate an exotic particle when they decayed and an apparatus to focus them. My best guess was that the reaction could be performed by any reasonably competent scientist in any lab on Earth. It would just never occur to them to actually do it, because the arrangement was strange and specific.

I hurried to the console in the central room, and demanded an explanation for the inclusion of such dangerous knowledge.

“The section contains instructions not to perform the reaction.”

“Someone might perform it anyway! Why did the Chukwans not try to prevent this?”

“They did. The section contains instructions not to perform the reaction.”

“You told me there were no weapons here!”

“There is no information on devices with the purpose of causing injury in this facility. The Chukwans who built it never intended to cause injury. They included this information as a warning, so that your species would not mistakenly execute the reaction.”

“Why would they include it at all?”

“This facility was built with the purpose of spreading knowledge.”

I started to type several replies in turn, erasing each one a few words in. What could one say to that? I sat down heavily on a chair in my camp, heart pounding and head spinning.

I had come here with the intention of distributing knowledge to all mankind. To give it to only an elite few would be to doom the world to tyranny, I knew that. But to give it to everyone — well. All it would take is one madman, one suicidal maniac, to destroy everything. There were already men willing to destroy themselves to hurt even a few innocents. I had little doubt that they would use such a tool, if it were available to them.

Perhaps I could erase the section on this specific doomsday reaction? Maybe. But I was not about to be able to say which pieces of information contained in the library would lead someone to the same knowledge the Chukwans had attained. If I were to destroy the reaction, but leave the breadcrumbs, I might only be delaying the inevitable. Actually, I realized, I’m delaying the inevitable anyway. If the Chukwans could discover it, so could we.

The data was too integrated, too obscure to me, to be sure that I would not be effectively making such a reaction public by revealing almost any part of the library. The Chukwans did not draw strong barriers between subjects, and scattered pieces of science were found in their histories and philosophies as well as their actual scientific treatises. Sentences that seemed like throwaways to me might hold the key to the underlying physics.

And I knew how to perform the reaction. God, I wished I hadn’t known it, but I did. At this point, just what I can remember would revolutionize science. Not long ago I’d thought those words with joy. Now they carried a hidden menace, a knowledge of what lay behind them.

I could try to keep my own mind secure, but there was no certainty of that — especially if anyone got wind that I had knowledge of this place once it was discovered. It would show up in the survey data, and so would the fact that I was one of a few with access to it. Someone who cared to look would not have trouble finding that I flew to Argentina at the right time. In the worst case, I could be coerced into revealing what I knew, or there might be some other way to access it. Even if this knowledge were not somehow extracted from me, I could develop dementia and reveal it by mistake, or worse, perform it myself before anyone knew to stop me.

If you had asked me before my expedition, I would have known, at some level, that the Universe’s truths were under no obligation to be convenient to human beings. But to know such a thing in theory is a very different matter from staring it in the face as fact. There was no defense against such a reaction, or a way to prevent it, at least not in any way I knew. For all I knew, someone in the distant galaxy was already performing this reaction, had already performed it, numbering the days of our world by the distance to whatever mad fool tried it divided by the speed of light.

There was nothing I could do to stop this information from being abused once it was known. And the Chukwans had, for the pure love of learning and the joy of sharing all they knew, provided knowledge that would accelerate its discovery by centuries.

There was only one thing left to do.

The helicopter’s rotors roared to life, and I rose quickly off the ground. An easy ascent, with the helicopter largely empty of the supplies that had weighed it down.

I hovered a thousand feet above the facility, and slipped the batteries into my satellite phone. No need to prevent tracking now. I dialed my home, so many thousands of miles away. I thought of the warmth of the fire on winter nights; the way Alex would greet me after a long trip abroad. I thought of the comforts of my own bed, the comfortable joys of the life I had left behind.

No good. The reception was too flaky at this latitude, where satellites would have appeared only below the mountains surrounding me. I’d been warned about this, warned that I might need to find clear vantage points. But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t risk this place falling into someone else’s hands. I didn’t know how long it would take to be found, but even the tiniest risk was too much.

I looked down at the facility. The warmth of operating for a few weeks had kept it mostly clear of snow, and it was a beacon of bright green alloy in the southern sun: an alloy the console had told me was durable, but brittle. The same went for its storage media.

It had not objected to my questions. A living creature might have found it strange when I asked about heat resistance or about whether information could be recovered should the facility fail. But the console had no such suspicions. It dutifully informed me that the structure was built to last, not to survive a cataclysm, and that there was little hope of recovering its data without the help of the technology within.

I had come here out of an ethical duty, a duty to help mankind flourish. A duty to keep weapons out of the wrong hands, a duty to make sure that mankind could grow and develop. A duty to preserve soft and human joys against those that would crush them. That duty remained.

I thought of the future I’d dreamed of only a week ago. A future of shining cities and healthy humans, a future of joy and peace. A future that depended only on mankind deciding, collectively, to seek it. A future any rational person would want. A future that we could not have, and that would die in an instant if we did have it.

I thought of the faith I’d had in knowledge, of the hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow. I thought of how naively I’d sought more tools for mankind, hoping that ninety-nine percent of humans being good would be enough.

I thought of the tanks of fuel lined up in the hallway below.

I turned the rotors off.