“We have been tagging the points the set-sets focused on.” At Aldrin’s nod one of the other Utopians, shrouded in a nowhere future where Earth and her sister planets had been disassembled rock by rock and spread into a shell to catch every last drip of daylight leaking from our dying sun, brought up the list. Martin made it through the first hundred names, then fell back into his seat, the data thundering on him like a waterfall. Papa took it standing up, though not in silence, the blood of a Greek and of a grandparent making him too much a storyteller to resist reading the juiciest parts aloud.

“Death of Akker Anaba in a car crash in 2392 enabled the Greenpeace-Mitsubishi merger? That’s more than sixty years ago!”

<keep scrolling.>

“Death of Gillian Joiner Dao in a car crash in 2262 enabled the Olympian-Hollyworld merger which created the Humanists. That’s… how far back does this go?”

The set-set sighed surrender. <all the way.>

“What do you mean, ‘all the way’? To the Paleolithic period?”

<to 2210. that’s when the sanling developed cartesian set-sets. that’s when the olympian-run saneer-weeksbooth bash’ started using us on the transit network. that’s when the system’s natural crash rate dropped from 96 per year to 9. actually it dropped from 96 to 4, but they told the public it was 9, so they could use the extra 5 for this.>

“2210.” Papa repeated with a long whistle. “That’s two hundred and forty-four years. Five crashes a year, plus four or five extra deaths carried out by other means than crashes, we’ll say nine victims per year, so… over a thousand victims?”

<two thousand, two hundred and four.>

We reach a breach here, reader: which are you, my near contemporary who breathed these troubled days alongside me, or remote posterity? If you lived through it, you must remember vividly when you first heard that number, where you were—out shopping, sharing dinner—who first told you, what the wind smelled like. Tens of thousands of days fade into memory’s melting pot, but not the day Death first took someone you loved, nor that day. If, on the other hand, you join me from remote posterity, then the picture must be altogether different. Two thousand, two hundred and four: in the coldness of a history book it must seem like nothing—Stalin killed as many in one weekend—and it must fade too beside the millions of the World Wars. Not so for us. For three centuries we had lived out our rose-tinted daydream, convinced that we were peaceful creatures, good at heart, like Locke or Jean-Jacques’s Noble Savages; now we woke to find ourselves still brutish humans in the thrall of Hobbes.

Papa took a breath and held it, one last pause. “Mycroft was right, then.”

“What?” Martin asked, already pale.

“To smear blood all over the Altar of Peace in Romanova. Three hundred years of world peace. Don’t you see it, Martin? This is why.”

“No. No, it can’t—”