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Only a fool wasted energy on things he could not control.

Such were the brittle threads of a relationship built not on trust but on a slurry of fear, mutual codependence, and self-interest.

I’ve learned to be wary when something makes you this excited.

The fallacy of your personal bias is inherent in your choice of words.

In the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism. p. 462

First, the fact he awoke at all. Cogito, ergo how the hell aren’t I dead?

Heartlessness wasn’t the sole province of the rich.

Freedom felt like… nothing.

Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. A gap in his consciousness where geasa had perpetually jostled for priority, demanding his obedience. It was the photographic negative of Jax’s existence during every minute of the 118 years since he’d been forged.

It was overwhelming. Exhilarating. Terrifying.

Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him. How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do? How did they know when to do anything without the benefit of geasa and metageasa to prioritize every single action of their waking lives? How did they order their daily existence without somebody to tell them what to do?

“Absence of proof,” said Bell, “is not proof of absence.”

They were old enough to know such things were forbidden, yet young enough still to find the forbidden irresistible rather than terrifying.

And, as was so often the case, the history taught to children was oversimplified, watered down, and ofttimes counterfactual.

The solution to global warming is not to fix the world, but to fix ourselves.