I keep wanting this to be complicated, because if it’s complicated then maybe I’m off the hook, and I’ve spent two dead worlds’ worth of cleverness getting myself off hooks. But it isn’t complicated. That’s the terrible, simple thing I have to tell you tonight. It comes down to two roads — only two — and I have walked the wrong one twice.
The material lays it out plainer than I’d like. There are, in the end, two ways to do this whole business of being alive among other people. You can spend yourself on them — actually serve them, actually put the other one first, even when it costs you, even when they can’t pay you back. Or you can run everything through yourself — bend the others to what you want, use them, win. Service to others, service to self. Love, or power. That’s the fork. Everything else is just decoration on one road or the other.
And I’ll be fair to the second road, because the material is, strangely, fair to it — it works. That’s the part nobody tells you. The power road gets you up the mountain too; it’s just a long cold climb with no one to climb it with. I know, because I took it. On Mars I took it dressed up as survival. On Maldek I took it dressed up as being right. Both times it felt like strength. Both times it ended in rust and broken rock.
Here’s what’s got me by the throat. The fork isn’t behind me. That’s what I assumed — that the remembering was just a tour of old sins, a museum. It isn’t. The boss makes my teeth itch and the fork is right there: pick up the weapon, be right, win. The person I betrayed calls a beat too long and the fork is right there: stay cold, stay safe, serve myself. It’s not history. It’s this morning. It’s every morning. The same exact choice that cracked two planets, handed back to me over coffee, in an office, in a body, on the third world they were good enough to give me.
And the material says a thing that should be encouraging and instead scares me half to death: that every time you choose, you make the next choice a little more you. Which cuts both ways. I’ve got two worlds of practice at choosing wrong. The groove is deep. The old coat fits.
I don’t get to undo Maldek. I don’t get to undo Mars. I’m starting to understand that’s not even the assignment. The assignment is the next time the boss opens his mouth.