Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

Nobody understood what the Absolute Zeros believed so hard, they couldn’t even wedge it into their lyrics yet: The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.

He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did.

“I’m…I’m the coyote. I make the most magnificent contraptions, and I always think this time, this time everyone will see how good I really am, but they only ever burn me up and leave me starving to death.”

“For lo, does not Goguenar’s Third Unkillable Fact tell us: ‘Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does?’ "

…Binned–a word which had come, over the millenia, to mean: carefully, lovingly recorded for posterity by the Elakhon and preserved against the ravages of time, war, and the children’s disrespect for history.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the fragile illusion of invulnerability inherent in being just like everyone else. No–it’s Englishblokeman.

Life is beautiful and life is stupid.

The question has never even been: Do you understand object permanence, can you recognize yourself in the mirror, do you bury your dead, do you bond emotionally with your young?…

Elephants do all those things, and some humans definitely don’t. The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other than that it rocks?…Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have a soul?

Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.

You have already heard the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

Neither Decibel nor Oort nor poor dead Mira ever imagined the power of the ordinary to gum up the works of the epic.

“Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?”

No one is ever really satisfied with what they’ve got, look at that skinny bastard Old Ruutu, he heated up his whole planet like a leftover takeaway, and he still wasn’t really that happy, if you ask me. People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they most want. Before and after, they’re all monsters.

The key to a happy life, Capo devoutly believed, was never giving much of a damn what happened in any given day so long as you got in a nap, a kill, and a snuggle, and the snuggle was optional.

Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down. You didn’t get it, I didn’t think you understood, you can’t sing a dirge to the reaper, he’s already heard them all. You gotta slaughter him with joy and a beat like the best of all possible shags,…

“Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all.”

Justice takes so long that by the time you get it, it’s gone off and smells like an old corpse. Forget about justice. Just knock back a big, stiff drink and move to a new town with fewer pronks living in it.

So they could feel a little more human by osmosis…Pain becomes playful, playful becomes pretty, pretty becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes profit, profit becomes safety, another day not working at Mr. Five Star, another day further from invisibility.

“We have always believed that one of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to look down upon others.”

“Damn…I thought you were the other one. I hate carbons. You all look the same.”

But most people can only be so anxious and so terrified and so sleepless and so cowed and awed before the yawning abyss of the future for so long. Eventually, the body simply can’t sustain it. Eventually, some work has to get done. Eventually, adrenal glands need a bit of a break.

… everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.

“As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. It’s grim.”

He hated this place. What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?

“I wish I were someone else. Someone you could rely on to turn it out no matter what. I’m afraid that whatever I had is lost by now. I haven’t had a song out in years. I haven’t had a good day in years. What if I get up there and just completely blow it? Or worse, what if I get up there and give the performance of my sorry life, the best show in the history of me, if the light of the world comes beaming out of me like a bloody Care Bear Stare for the ages, and it’s not good enough? If you lot somehow hear in my voice all the worst of us?”

Marry me, and we’ll make a little bubble universe where nothing has to change and the elections never happened and it’s just Arkable Us, neon against the night, ice cream against the world.

I promise never to skip school again, just come back. It’s lonely being the last of us. I wish I could fix it all. I wish I could have been better. That’s all. I just wish I was better.

“When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light years.”

…their favorite children and their ailing parents singing a duet about how much and how desperately they needed them.

It blossomed all over again into cosmic grief at the ultimate impossibility of communication between two living beings.

I can’t wait for your monarchs to decide to hide it, lose control of the narrative, deny the evidence, call me a weather balloon, confess and resign, and finally leak a half-redacted version of what I tried to say to a newspaper friendly to one faction or another.

You’re just shy of figuring out how to shuffle your horde of hormone-curdled control-obsessed malignant narcissists offworld.

I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.