The Atlas Six

“You know why you don’t understand me?” Parisa answered Reina’s thoughts, stepping closer to lower her voice. “Because you think you’ve figured me out. You think you’ve met me before, other versions of women like me, but you have no idea what I am. You think my looks are what make me? My ambitions? You can’t begin to know the sum of my parts, and you can stare all you like, but you won’t see a damn thing until I show you.”

Nico was enormously likable, unfairly so, and no matter how clever or talented Libby was, students and faculty alike preferred Nico to her. Whatever gift it was he had, it was like Midas; the effortless turning of nonsense to gold, more a reflex than a skill, and Libby, a gifted academic, had never been able to learn it. Nico’s brand of easy charm had no metric for study, no identifiable markers of finesse.

Many people incorrectly assume time to be a steady incline, a measured arc of growth and progress, but when history is written by the victors the narrative can often misrepresent that shape.

But as the world itself will tell you, something put in motion will not stop.

What they did not realize yet, Dalton thought in silence, was the safety of a cage, the security of containment. Given a task, even a lab rat could be capable of satisfaction; from a prescribed morality, contentment; from the fulfillment of a purpose, the discovery of a cause. Endless choices, by contrast, would only leave the rat to chase itself in circles, unable to rest or be fulfilled

When an ecosystem dies, nature makes a new one.

The patient shall inherit the earth

“The unremarkable are punished for their unremarkability,” she said.

Atlas set down his cup of tea, steeping the moment in silence.

“No,” he said at last, adjusting his tie. “It is the remarkable who suffer. The unremarkable are passed over, yes, but greatness is not without its pains.”

Conservation done well was to survive when others would perish.

To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness, which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight.