text; a bit past midnight!

[quackery]

so if you somehow had the choice to stay here or go home right now what would you do? pretend you don't have, like, a few days to think it over or anything. you just have to pick. 60 seconds or less! i just want to see what people would do

[No ulterior motives here; she really is simply curious to hear what people have to say about the topic. Listening to different opinions on a large subject like this is a good way to spend a night - or morning, as it were.]

Comments

[heartsink]

You're pretty optimistic, aren't you? I'm not surprised.

[quackery]

i am, but that's being realistic, not optimistic

[heartsink]

You say it's not set in stone, but as counter to mine, what you mean is, you don't think something that involves so many can go so badly and stay that way.

Isn't that right?

[quackery]

no it definitely can

i mean i'm not blind, i know stuff like that has happened. so maybe set in stone was the wrong wording. what i meant was somewhere along the line, someone could have done something differently and things would have turned out better. things end badly sometimes, really badly, but it's not inevitable that they do. that's what i meant.

[heartsink]

How do you think this story ends?

[quackery]

[There's a delay before the response comes through. She wants to be able to believe without reservation that in the end they will prevail. Years ago, perhaps even months ago, she would have. The technology that they have makes it more promising, of course; if something goes wrong, there's a possibility can return to the past and correct it with enough effort. No armies have ever had such an advantage, she assumes. She refuses to write off the chance of success. It's real, and she wants desperately to cling to it.

Even so, it feels like the progress that can be made with such a power moves at a snail pace regardless. They fight to change the battles they've lost, and yet continue to lose more. She wants to have belief, but she knows she should be realistic about their situation, too; the best way to start helping make this world better is to see it as it really is. So, how does she think it ends?]

i don't know

[She knows there are people here who will never stop struggling, who will even give their lives to ensure a future for the Exiles. But will that be enough? A time ago, she might have believed that was the most important factor in judging how this would turn out, but — people cared deeply about saving that world from the United Earth. People cared deeply about protecting the city from the bomb. Will there come a time when people care deeply about winning the war, but it still remains fruitless? Is the ability to change the past enough to save them?]

[heartsink]

It won't.

[ There's no tone to text, so her own feelings—the way her approach might soften, how she might try to comfort through awful truths—are lost, as is so much else. As so much will be. ]

The way things are now, and the way they're set to go, the ink will never be able to dry before it's smudged out and rewritten. The more done to the past to fix the mistakes of this world, the more is changed in its present. That much is obvious to everyone, isn't it? That's the point, so we're told. But with each present exchanged for another, that's a future destroyed. All for the sake of finding that one good ending.

But who will decide which end is the right one? When things look better, who will decide when things are good enough? How will that conclusion, that enough is enough, ever be reached?

The United Earth, the Initiative, the Exiles—they're all humans. So are most Transports, though not all. And more than anything, human hearts are selfish. There will always be pasts that "need" changing, timelines that "need" correcting. Why did this person have to die? Why did this calamity have to happen? Why did things have to go this way?

The dust of their past will never settle. This world's "present" will never become steady ground. There will be no path to follow to the future. There will never be a future worth hoping for, because those hopes can never blossom.

We could rewrite the world from its conception, but the story won't end if the ink never dries.

[ All these heavy, depressing metaphors nobody asked for. ]

[quackery]

so what you think will happen is that we'll keep going forward making the past better and better and saving more and more people and never stop?

as far as possibilities go that doesn't seem awful to me

[heartsink]

What point is there to bettering a world, when it will cease to be the next instant?

Whoever made up the populace of Exsilium before we arrived are already dead, Ahiru. They've been erased and destroyed, long before the final bomb dropped. And their replacements were destroyed, and their replacements, and so on.

[quackery]

but we've already begun to change things and the world is still recognizable from one moment to the next

unless what you mean is that you think somehow we're going to mess up somewhere along the line and erase ourselves which yeah okay that's possible