“Why?” Caesar cried, his arm convulsing as he held me. “Apollo moved me to tears dozens of times, their future, their vision of the infinity of human potential. Now you’re telling me that was a lie? That even Apollo believed we’re doomed to eternal war? That the instinct to violence is so ingrained it can’t be overcome?”

We both shook, I and Caesar, weak as leaves. We heard Apollo’s words again, his certainty, his vision of our bold posterity which will stamp footprints onto worlds too distant for us to yet imagine how to find them, but find we will, he knew we will, as the boundary of human knowledge, art, and hope expands like a parabola sweeping ever closer to infinity. Have you wondered, reader, what made Apollo special? Why his classmate Aeneas Mardi introduced him so eagerly to Cornel then-not-yet-MASON? Why MASON brought him to Andō, Kosala, Spain, to the Anonymous? Rewrote the definition of Familiaris for him? Why they all relied on him as sole ambassador from this strange Hive whose crisscrossed constellations reveal no leader? His gift was this: he could explain Utopian thought in words the rest of us could understand. The wall that makes them alien, the vizors, U-speak, their cold and separate plans, was lifted somehow with Apollo, so the light that guides the rest of them, for once, could touch us, too. Perhaps it was because he burned brightest, enough to pierce the veil, or perhaps he alone among them tried to pierce it, not believing with the others that long peace and the desire to maintain this happy present had bred all ambition out of the rest of us. Some men are built to love many times, some once, and MASON used his once, not on Madame, not even on his Empire, but on Apollo.

“Apollo never lied to you, Caesar,” I replied, gasping as my lungs lurched with the power of my tears. “How can you even think that? Apollo believed there was no limit to humanity, no world, no transformation, no dream beyond our power to make real, that with reason and ambition in our blood we can achieve anything, become anything! Just not in time.”

He gripped me harder. “In time for what?”

“Mardi,” I answered. “War day. Mars day. In two hundred and fifty years the next stage of the Great Project will be complete. Do you think a greedy, selfish Earth will sit back and watch the minority they most distrust take sole possession of a whole new world? How many wars were fought over the Americas? Over Africa? Over expansion? In ten thousand years, maybe in one thousand years, humanity will have progressed enough to no longer feel envy or greed or hate the ‘other,’ but in two hundred and fifty? Utopia is optimistic but not blind. When the terraforming is complete there will be war, all the Hives of this complacent Earth united against Utopia. The conflict will consume one or both, unless by then we have had another war to change the character of the Hives, or, at the very least, to leave some veterans to teach us again how to wage wars, and how to survive them.”