Machine: A White Space Novel

It doesn’t pay to be an asshole to people who are being careful to do their job well.

Funny how long it took me—how old I was when I realized that if something didn’t work, you could change it. You didn’t just have to live with the problem, work around it. You could adapt, improvise. And overcome. You could take steps to make a thing better.

You can’t take it with you, as somebody wise observed. But you can sure roll around in it for as long as you’re alive.

[Of course there is inheritance. Some of our inheritances are personal; some are a commonwealth. Skills and competencies learned from parents are an inheritance. Not having to care about taking risks because you know somebody will be there to rescue you is an inheritance. Feeling safe is an inheritance.]

We cannot isolate ourselves from systems, have no impact, change nothing as we pass. We alter the world by observing it. The best we can do is not pretend that we don’t belong to a system; it’s to accept that we do, and try to be fair about using it. To keep it from exploiting the weakest.

Maybe I could do that for myself, and do all these other things for society, and make it all work. I didn’t have to make a martyr of myself to be effective. And I didn’t have to give up one important thing because something else was important, too.

You get so used to hurting that when it goes away not being in pain doesn’t even feel normal, exactly. It feels like having superpowers. I had so much energy and everything was so easy all of a sudden. So weird to think that a lot of people have superpowers all the time and don’t even know it.

It doesn’t mean that I’m okay with being a terrible mother. Or that we never regret the sacrifices we make to get what we want, or what we think we need.

We cannot isolate ourselves from systems, have no impact, change nothing as we pass. We alter the world by observing it. The best we can do is not pretend that we don’t belong to a system; it’s to accept that we do, and try to be fair about using it. To keep it from exploiting the weakest.