“Remember”—Caesar limped back a pace, gazing up at the statue’s mirrored vizor—“I was not yet Emperor, did not yet understand the real relationship between Utopia, the other Hives, and mine. You know how passionate Apollo was. All it took was some new discovery about fish or enzymes to move them to tears, but I’d never seen them hysterical like this. Eventually they made me understand. Humanity has everything now, everything: power, prosperity, stability, longevity, leisure, charity, peace. Vocateurs earn society’s respect doing the work they love, and those who aren’t vokers put in their twenty hours and spend the greater part of life at play. Happiness has taken the place of wealth as our prime measure of success, and envy no longer hungers for rare riches hoarded by the great, but for smiles and happy hours which all Earth has in infinite supply. This is what past civilizations wished for, worked for, what emperors and presidents and prime ministers and kings are supposed to try to give their people. We have. We’re done.” He gave a little hiccup, my first proof that the water on Caesar’s cheeks was more than rain. “Every life has the potential to be a good one, for the first time in history. And everyone’s secretly afraid that it’s fragile, that if we try to make it better, change something, if the Hive proportions shift too much, if science raises the life expectancy too fast, or Brill’s Institute finally figures out how to upload our brains into computers, or make us all into impossible geniuses, it will fall apart. Golden Ages always end with Dark ones. The Exponential Age, from the Black Death to the World Wars, was all about growth, acceleration, future-building, change, recovery first, then progress, advancement, exploration, interconnection, every generation experiencing a new world, different, more advanced than the generation before, a state of constant change, mixed but usually more for good than bad. When our modern age began after the Chuch War, as the Hives rose and happiness with them, humanity slowed down. We started taking baby steps, not exponential ones, a few more cured diseases, new Olympic records, some new toys, but calling that enough. Too much change is dangerous. A happy world wanted progress to stop. Apollo understood in a way I couldn’t what it meant to be the Imperator Destinatus: I was going to take on the duty to maintain history’s greatest empire and protect my three billion citizens by not letting anything change. That conversation was the first time in my life I regretted being a Mason. The Humanists, Europe, the Mitsubishi, the Cousins, it’s the same for them. They vie with each other, get better at what they’re already best at, but change nothing. Even Gordian’s experiments rarely leave their Institute. Now we’ve discovered O.S., the dark side of our paradise, and it’s horrible, unforgivable, but what is two thousand murders to what we’ve already given up? The future. Only Utopia thinks the future is more important than the present, that there are worlds that we could make which are worth destroying the one we have here. Or, at least, they used to think that, but if Mirai Feynman would rather stay home with their bash’ and kids than study the first ants on Mars, maybe even Utopia is vulnerable to too much peace. Our happy world has made complacency contagious. Apollo asked me then if, in two hundred and fifty years when Mars is ready, there would be anyone left, even among Utopians, willing to give up all the pleasures of Earth’s greatest Golden Age for the harsh life of a colonist. Then they stabbed me with a pocketknife.”