Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 40274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 201(@200wpm)___ 161(@250wpm)___ 134(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 201(@200wpm)___ 161(@250wpm)___ 134(@300wpm)
“I’m a physicist.” I’m proud of myself for remembering my cover that smoothly. When I was preparing for this job I spent hours looking in the mirror, telling myself I was a physicist. I said science words to myself. Words like momentum and inertia and neutrino.
“True,” he says. “You can work on the mechanics of lying.”
“That’s still not really my wheelhouse.”
He smiles and drops a paper full of mathematical equations on it. I recognize some of the symbols, but obviously I don’t know what any of the equations mean. I am going to have to find a way to quickly talk my way out of this before I get found out.
Cir
She is an adept little liar. It’s impressive. Many would find her dishonesty infuriating but I see what it is, a survival adaptation. Humans are still primitive in many ways, needing to struggle to get by. They have kept a lot of behaviors they will need to shed in order to be good citizens of the stars. Their tendency to lie is merely one of many traits we are hoping to educate out of them. We are also working on their tendency to war. Truthful, peaceful citizens are what the universe needs.
She sits down at her desk and begins to do something approximating work. I can’t imagine what she is really doing.
I, however, do have to actually work. Human populations are suffering, and we are attempting to relieve that suffering as quickly as possible. We do, however, have to work with the planet’s available resources.
“There’s an angry billionaire here to see you, Cir.” Arlo appears. I notice Jessica puts her head up and smiles at him, apparently happy to see him. She gives a little finger wave, to which he inclines his head.
“I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MAN IN CHARGE!”
“Baz Sugar Snuff has flown here, sir. He wishes to speak with our leader.”
Usually the only humans able to reach Eros Station are those specifically invited, but one appears to have taken it upon himself to fly here directly. He must have worked very hard to put something together capable of making a landing on our dock. Or, someone worked very hard. It’s very unlikely he had anything to do with any of it. Human hierarchies rarely seat the most capable at the top. Instead, the bright and talented occupy a lower echelon.
The human man walks in with the air of a person who expects to be regarded as important for no particular reason. He is perhaps fifty years old, though some cosmetic effort has been undertaken to make him appear younger. His hair has been cut after the fashion of younger people, and his face has been augmented to improve the line of his jaw and the cut of his general jib. He is a walking piece of theater, a very different kind of liar from Jessica.
He looks me up and down. “Are you the leader?”
“Indeed,” I reply.
“You don’t know what you are doing,” he says. “I’ve come to help, before you destroy the world.”
I hear Jessica snort softly to herself. I would send her out of the room, but he does not seem to notice her presence, and I do not want her out of my sight. She has a talent for trouble.
“And what facet, specifically, do you imagine is destroying the world?”
“Since you’ve started meddling, people have been working less and buying less, which has cause the economy to tank. The shares of my companies are worth practically nothing. We’ve made practically nothing. Do you understand what that does to the economy?”
“The economy,” I repeat.
“Yes. Do aliens have a concept of the economy, or is your hippy space freak commune all you know?” His attitude is nasty, but that is because he is accustomed to being able to speak to everybody however he feels. He has not come into direct contact with cold hard reality in a very long time. He is a man in a bubble, imagining that the universe truly does revolve around him. He is used to those he is speaking with being impressed by him and afraid of him. I, of course, feel neither of those things. I feel sorry for him, for his hubris and weakness.
I do not reply to his rude question, imagining that it is not so much a question as a statement giving him the opportunity to say yet more nonsense.
“You don’t understand what you’re doing. Your interference, your aid, your telling the world that the future is bright and hopeful. It’s making people happy, and it is crashing the economy. They think they’ve been saved, and they’ve stopped trying. The dollar is worth almost nothing. Trillions of dollars have been wiped off markets. Do you understand? You don’t understand. You’re up here playing gods with our species. Well. You’re not gods. You’re just shiny people, and you need to start respecting our ways.”