You do understand: It has to be <\/i>your choice.<\/i><\/p>\n
They never stopped telling me I was free to leave. They told me while they were still wrangling asteroids out past Mars; they told me as they chewed through those rocks like steel termites, bored out caverns and tunnels, layered in forests and holds and life-support systems rated for a longer operational lifespan than the sun itself. They really laid it on after that L2 fiasco, when the singularity imploded during final testing. Not a whisper of cancelling the project \u2014 even though the magic upon which the hole thing rested had just eaten half the factory floor and a quarter of the propulsion team \u2014 but in the wake of that tragedy they seemed to think it especially important to remind me of the exits.<\/p>\n
It’s your decision. No one can make it for you.<\/i><\/p>\n
They drove it home even when I laughed in their faces. I didn’t have to point out the obvious: that I’d been trained and tweaked since before I’d even been born, that they’d groomed my parents as carefully as they were grooming me. Thirty years before I was even conceived, I was already bound for the stars.<\/p>\n
Knowing all that doesn’t change anything, of course. I can’t take my eyes off infinity. I want<\/i> the stars, I want to revel and thrill to the glorious endless isolation of deep space. No other aspiration has ever been worth a moment’s thought. So what if I was built that way? It’s what I feel; I don’t know any other way to be.<\/p>\n
Still. We’re a civilized society, yes? You don’t draft people against their will, even if the very concept has been a laughingstock for the better part of a century now. They give me no end of opportunity to back out now because there will be no opportunity to back out later, and later<\/i> covers so very much more time for regrets. Once Eriophora <\/i>sails, there will be no coming back.<\/p>\n
It has to be my decision. It’s the only way they won’t have blood on their hands.<\/p>\n
Still, when they held open that mutual escape hatch one last time, I don’t think they were expecting the answer they got.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Give me a month. I’ll get back to you.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You do understand: It has to be your choice. They never stopped telling me I was free to leave. They told me while they were still wrangling asteroids out past Mars; they told me as they chewed through those rocks like steel termites, bored out caverns and tunnels, layered in forests and holds and life-support […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiblet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4620"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4623,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4620\/revisions\/4623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}