The new Authority promised a lighter hand.
They're keeping that promise. Technically.
Eight months after the Abaddon incident, the exile zones have doors, a junior cosmic Observer is attending community board meetings and developing strong opinions about drainage infrastructure, and Michael — formerly the universe's most reliable executioner — has somehow become a regular attendee at World Guard advisory sessions. Nobody is entirely comfortable with this. Michael included.
But the being who designed Earth's universe wants it back. Not to destroy it — something subtler and, in its way, worse. The Architect's proposal is elegant, reasonable, and would give the Authority permanent control over the very thing that makes humanity unique: the ability to adapt, to grow, to find their own way through the Prime Wave's vast and complicated ocean. The vote is in three weeks. The margin is close.
Michael has a moral argument. Director Sokolov, running on bad coffee and a nosebleed he refuses to acknowledge, has a legal one. Eighth, the Observer, has been filing suspiciously uninformative reports. And in the voluntary zone, in folding chairs in a repurposed warehouse, the people who've had everything taken from them are doing something the Authority genuinely did not model for: building something that lasts.
Freedom isn't something a god grants.
But it helps to have one in your corner.
Supreme Wave is the concluding volume of The Prime Wave Accounting — the end of Michael's accounting, and the beginning of everything else.
Genre: Science Fiction
They're keeping that promise. Technically.
Eight months after the Abaddon incident, the exile zones have doors, a junior cosmic Observer is attending community board meetings and developing strong opinions about drainage infrastructure, and Michael — formerly the universe's most reliable executioner — has somehow become a regular attendee at World Guard advisory sessions. Nobody is entirely comfortable with this. Michael included.
But the being who designed Earth's universe wants it back. Not to destroy it — something subtler and, in its way, worse. The Architect's proposal is elegant, reasonable, and would give the Authority permanent control over the very thing that makes humanity unique: the ability to adapt, to grow, to find their own way through the Prime Wave's vast and complicated ocean. The vote is in three weeks. The margin is close.
Michael has a moral argument. Director Sokolov, running on bad coffee and a nosebleed he refuses to acknowledge, has a legal one. Eighth, the Observer, has been filing suspiciously uninformative reports. And in the voluntary zone, in folding chairs in a repurposed warehouse, the people who've had everything taken from them are doing something the Authority genuinely did not model for: building something that lasts.
Freedom isn't something a god grants.
But it helps to have one in your corner.
Supreme Wave is the concluding volume of The Prime Wave Accounting — the end of Michael's accounting, and the beginning of everything else.
Genre: Science Fiction