Timeline Of Life Quotes

When the past gets its teeth into our daily life, it may get to grips with an astringent reality and adjust our timeline. By recognizing ourselves in the light of our history, we become aware of what we are. ("Going back to yesterday")

Sanjit says his apartment, the same one in which he grew up, has been flooded many times by the midsummer torrents. For what has been for millennia a primarily agricultural society, rains simultaneously destroy, create, and preserve life in India, similar to the functions of the three premier Hindu gods, Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu. Every time Kolkata gets pounded by a cyclone, or when the monsoon first erupts in June (although the recent warming of the Indian Ocean increasingly disturbs a once-consistent timeline), Sanjit never fails to send along a video, his house flooded – seemingly destroyed – but the smiles on his, Bajju’s, or other house-guest’s faces signify just the opposite, having been cooled and relieved of perpetual heat. Flooded, they remain preserved.

It's time that I stop referring to myself, thinking about myself, planning for myself, according to the gridlines and the timelines and the guidelines of people. I will expand in this universe, I will not stay on the lines nor within the lines written by this world.

My life-altering moment would never be a measurement of time. It would never be as simple as marking a few points in the timeline of my life that I could identify as transcendent. It was him. Aaron. He was my moment. And for as long as I had him, my life would constantly be changing, be altered. I’d be challenged, cherished, loved. With him, I’d live.

My best testimonies are from the times I thought I couldn't survive.

Yes, a proud, proud moment in my life. If only that could go on my Facebook timeline!

It's not what you go through that makes you strong: it is how you handle the situation that gives you strength.

...Chanel didn't start out with a mission statement, nor a corporate vision, nor a roadmap for success, nor timeline for achieving her goals, nor an action item list, nor any of those other high-falutin' concepts we associate with mega modern multinational success stories.

Don't judge my past base on my present action, remember past and present are of two different timeline

...that in every timeline of life there are no words that can transcend the things we feel.

it it strange, suddenly having a memory come back out of nowhere. you think you're going crazy; you wonder where this recollection has been hiding all your life. you try to push it away, because you think you've hammered out the whole timeline of your life, but then you see that one extra moment, and suddendly you are breaking apart what you though was a solid segment, and seeing it for what it is: just a string of events, shoulder to shoulder, and a gap where there is room for one more.

We must experience certain things in life, even in our childhood, so we can later look back and value the journey.

In another life, another timeline, he would have cared as a son does for his mother. If she’d been born different. But as he accepted, they were who they were. She’d regretted giving birth to him and he’s resented living ever since.

Frankly, fictional people appeal far more to me than real people do. In fiction, the choices have to make sense. The timeline proceeds rationally. Emotions are explained to me. Characters feel the way they are supposed to feel in response to the actions of others. Nobody stays in a bad situation because of inertia or low self-esteem. That would make for a truly shitty story. But in real life . . . God, in real life people so rarely behave in ways that improve their circumstances.

They want me to account for my next ten years. Their way, everything in your life turns into an item on a list. Something to accomplish. You get to see how your life looks flattened out. The shortest distance between two points is a timeline, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life. Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

Don’t forget to collect the memories on your journey. Remember, if you only focus on your destination, you will miss out on the benefits of the journey.

No matter what people want to believe, life is locked in the past. It's all we are - a timeline of events that make up a person.

Do you ever just want to shut it all off? Not have to think about the next second of your life? Go on an unplanned road trip? Have a one-night stand with the cute guy you scrolled past on your timeline? Social media makes you think you have all this freedom, but you don’t. Not really. You’re stuck behind a device watching others live out their dreams. You post selfies of fake smiles and expensive clothes, hoping that someone will envy you. Reassure you just how good you have it. All the while hating your life. “Smile, dear, you never know who is watching you,

Have you ever been caught off guard by the sound of your own heartbeat? Maybe you’ve pressed your ear weirdly on your pillow, and now all you can hear is your own proof of life. You are confronted with your mortality in a base, clock-ticking kind of way: you have an engine room, and it has a finite timeline. What a miracle and a privilege.

You’re not behind in life. There’s no schedule or timetable that we all must follow. It’s all made up. Wherever you are right now is exactly where you need to be. Seven billion people can’t do everything in exactly the same scheduled order. We are all different with a variety of needs and goals. Some get married early, some get married late, while others don’t get married at all. What is early? What is late? Compared with whom? Compared with what? Some want children, others don’t. Some want a career; others enjoy taking care of a house and children. Your life is not on anyone else’s schedule. Don’t beat yourself up for where you are right now. It’s YOUR timeline, not anyone else’s, and nothing is off schedule.

Karma literally means “deed” or “act” and more broadly names the universal principle of cause and effect, action and reaction which governs all life. Karma is a natural law of the mind, just as gravity is a law of matter.

I remember my life's timeline by the books I read, their covers, the way they looked on my bookshelves, the way they smelled, what they spoke to me about.

The Timeline of a Life being Long or Short, is Computed on the Benchmark of How You Live It...

Life is meaningful because it ends. We are brief blips on a long timeline, colliding with other people, other unlikely collections of atoms and energy that somehow existed at the same time we did. Even in the best of circumstances, being reanimated could result in a permanent homesickness for a time and a place you cannot return to. A time and a place that no longer exists. But if none of this is hurting anybody, if it helps these people live and it helps them die, I see no reason to deprive them of their experiment, or to mock it. I like their optimism but I do not share it. We do what we can to get by, it's a lullaby on a deathbed.

As long as you’re relying on your will, your plans, and your timeline, you’ll feel blocked and fearful—stressed in the present, worried about the future, unsure of decisions, and so on. But the moment you let go and allow, an energy of support will take over.

It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending.

Deep space rendered mortal time-lines inconsequential. Few things were as old, or pervasive, as the vast, encroaching darkness of the universe.

This is how silence works in families: it means questions go unanswered, timelines are unclear, and the details of a child's life are a mystery that will not be resolved.

I want to breathe the same air as you every minute of every day of my life. No matter how many timelines I live.

Lots of people have a “timeline” in mind for their life: the age when they want to get married, have kids, retire. The best advice I ever got was to forget all about this schedule. Why try to squeeze your life into a totally artificial construct based on meaningless rules? You’ll end up doing stupid things, like randomly marrying the guy you happen to be dating when you’re 29 because your self-imposed wedding deadline is age 30. Despite people hotly debating the “correct” age to tick off life’s milestones, it’s different for everyone – there’s no right or wrong answer.

The timeline of your life is not a straight line, after all; it is a series of ebbs and flows, backs and forths, heres and theres. You are nowhere and everywhere all at once, and that means that most of the time, the best you can do is be present to the moment, be open to the unlearning and the learning, and trust that you’re doing the work of Love.

Cis people always have timelines. I mean, I know not every cis person has that life, but—what are the cis people in my life doing? What are they doing in your life? Versus what the trans people in your life are doing? On a macro level. Ask yourself that.

what makes timelines thrive is CREATION and you are part of this. your way makes ripples of creation whether you are writing song or book or making spaghetti or turning on a light. YOU ARE INFINITELY POWERFUL JUST BY BEING YOU do not forget this strength and wield it for love

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look bak on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others. A moment that creates a “before” and an “after.

if you look at history of this timeline and what has been accomplished, from crawling out of the dang swamp to flying spacebuds, it is difficult to wrap mind around how incredible libraries are. in the running for peak of human achievement and i feel this is sometimes forgotten

They all seem infected with a vivaciousness that isn't common in our compound, and there are more smiles on their faces than I've ever seen at once. And yet as I watch them, I feel more intensely than ever the knowledge that I'm not one of them. For these moral humans, birthdays are a kind of countdown to the end, the ticking clock of a dwindling life. For me, birthdays are notches on an infinite timeline. Will I grow tired of parties one day? Will my birthday become meaningless? I imagine myself centuries from now, maybe at my three-hundredth birthday, looking all the way back to my seventeenth. How will I possibly be happy, remembering the light in my mother's eyes? The swiftness of Uncle Antonio's steps as he dances? The way my father stands on edge of the courtyard, smiling in that vague, absent way of his? The scene shifts and blues in my imagination. As if brushed away by some invisible broom, these people whom I've known my entire life disappear. The courtyard is empty, bare, covered in decaying leaves. I imagine Little Cam deserted, with everyone dead and gone and only me left in the shadows. Forever.

The trip ahead would put us in uncomfortable situations for which there would be little prior experience to inform our decisions; it would demand we shift our perspectives and check our timelines at the door; it would push us to reach out to strangers across barriers of language and insecurity; it would require us to acknowledge our smallness in the world. These are hallmarks of a great, life-affirming trip, and we hadn’t even left the country yet.

The first time I looked into a microscope at seaweed and pond water micro- organisms, there was something inside me that shifted—like the way people describe falling in love. And if I hadn’t been given the opportunity to cut into a cow’s eyeball at the age of fifteen, maybe I would have never majored in science, or gone on the semester study abroad trip to Colombia with the UC Santa Cruz biology department. So yes, I blamed seaweed and pond water microorganisms, a cow’s eyeball, and my teachers, the real culprits, for starting me down this path. Just like accident investigators put together a timeline, I call this the causation analysis of my love life.

...I am here today, alive today, because I made the right choices, however brief and insignificant they felt at the time. I made the right choices.

Don’t just do something “fun.” Find a way to create structure around a project and build in a timeline.

We always say that the times change, but truly speaking, the time remains the same, it is we who occur along the timelines.

We neither fear death nor look forward to it, but revere it as a most exalted experience. Life, death and the afterlife are all part of our path to perfect oneness with God.

I thought all these firsts came in a predetermined timeline, but relationships can’t chart a course over three acts like a screenplay. Life is so much messier than a story arc.

This was the life she had been in mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.

Every person has their own timeline of success. Others succeed sooner others later. As in everything, both timelines have both advantages and disadvantages.

The most beautiful thing is that despite the shallow life we sometimes succumb to - the soul has no timeline and it knows what it wants and will yearn within until it seeks the journey

Ye know what they always say. There are three types of men in a woman’s life: the one that ye marry, the one that ye screw (literally or metaphorically), and the one that leaves ye.

Frankly, fictional people appeal far more to me than real people do. In fiction, the choices have to make sense. The timeline proceeds rationally. Emotions are explained to me. Characters feel the way they are supposed to feel in response to the actions of others. Nobody stays in a bad situation because of inertia or low self-esteem. That would make for a truly shitty story. But in real life . . .

Spread your arms out to your sides, like a plane. Your wingspan is a timeline. Your left fingertip represents the time of the first single-celled life on earth. And your right fingertip is right this minute. Between the two is 3.7 billion years of time, the history of life on earth. From your left fingertip, all the way up your arm, past your left shoulder, across your chest, and past your right shoulder, life on earth is nothing but bacteria. By the time you reach your right wrist, the most impressive form of life on earth, the king of beasts, is the worm. In the middle of your right palm you finally get your dinosaurs, and they're extinct by your last finger joint. Run your eyes along that history again so far. All that history, all that life, and still no appearance by the Main Attraction, the species for whom everything is supposedly made - humankind. So when do humans finally show up at the party? Well it's more than fashionably late. Homo sapiens fits in one fingernail clipping.

I will stay as long as I can by yere side,” He said. Feeling overwhelmed, I whispered to him, “We are living in borrowed time now.” “We are all mortals living in borrowed time, my lady,” was his reply.

I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase—nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it. I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose. And as long as I had a part in the music of the spheres, even if it was only a single grace note, I was not worthless. Nor was I alone.

A tip for the new you: Growth has its own evolutionary timeline, whether #personal or professional. Rethink "Throwback-Thursday" today and consider what's old that has yet to be thrown out...and what should be renewed within, around and all about you. Communicate it with your energy, and your thrive vibe for life. No matter what your personal/professional purpose...that right there will make you interesting, engagement worthy and always attractive!

Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline of his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable. Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there's a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than others.

My characters have a life of their own, they write their stories. I’m just the fingers typing the words, the guiding hand occasionally telling them that what they are doing is bullshit, and the brain to keep the timeline and story straight.

When I first started following writers on social media, I imagined a deluge of profound quotes, writing tips and insights into the plight of wordsmiths. There was some of that. Mostly though, my timeline was taken up with their obsession with coffee: 'I want coffee/I'm having coffee/I've had coffee.' Then came photos of their favourite coffee mug/pot/shop/barista. So, if you've enjoyed a recently-published book, give credit to writers: the vampiric aficionados of the coffee cherry.

There is a valid reason social media is linked to depression and loneliness. We live in a time when many people spend countless hours a day online strolling through the timeline of others with envy, regret, and little appreciation for their own life.

TIMELINE OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER’S LIFE 1865-Laura’s sister Mary is born in Pepin, Wisconsin 1867-Laura Ingalls is born in Pepin, Wisconsin 1869-The Ingallses move to Indian Territory, Kansas 1870-Caroline Ingalls, “Carrie,” is born in Kansas 1871-The Ingallses return to the Big Woods of Wisconsin 1874-Lives in a dugout near Walnut Grove, Minnesota 1875-Charles Frederick Ingalls, “Freddy,” is born 1876-Laura’s brother, Freddy, dies at nine months old Laura moves with her family to Burr Oak, Iowa 1877-Grace Ingalls is born in Burr Oak 1879-Mary becomes blind after a fever 1880-The Ingallses begin homesteading in De Smet, Dakota Territory 1885-Almanzo Wilder and Laura Ingalls marry 1886-Rose Wilder born in De Smet 1894-The Wilders move to Mansfield, Missouri 1932-Little House in the Big Woods is published when Laura is sixty-five 1954-Laura awarded the first Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, for her eight-book Little House series 1957-Laura (age ninety) dies at her Rocky Ridge home in Mansfield

This contact that I experienced was not only life threatening at the time but has ever since been and will always be a part of me and those involved. The most dramatic thing of the entire situation was what happen afterwards and the interrogations and all.

That's what writing fiction was, wasn't it? Processing your own life, answering all those questions in any way you wanted to, since fictional worlds operated with their own language and their own rules and their own timelines. They offered their own answers.

think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others. A moment that creates a “before” and an “after.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there's a sharp spike somewhere along te way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others. A moment that creates a "before" and an "after.

Life was far from perfect. The circus celebrated that. And while some believed that is only mocked it, Pippa knew better. She knew deeper. She knew, in her soul, that they found communion under the circus banner. And they would rescue each other, because that's what family did.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others. A moment that creates a “before” and an “after.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there's a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others. A moment that creates a 'before' and an 'after.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others. A moment that creates a ‘before’ and an ‘after’.

It’s crucial to emphasize that grief defies a linear path and cannot be confined to a predetermined timeline for “moving on” from a loss. Instead, grief becomes a lifelong journey, transforming and evolving in diverse ways as you integrate it into your life and carry it with you through time.

Women with dark skin are sharing selfies on social media after decades of being underrepresented in the mainstream media. From what I have observed much of the dark skin adoration on social media appears to come from us - black women. We tend to use the appreciation hashtags with our own pictures of photographs of dark skin women whom we feel are stunning. While I am loving this fierceness.. There is just one sidetone to this revolution: I feel as if we are much more appreciated if we show more skin. The timelines are filled with absolutely beautiful dark-skinned women but most sadly most of the time they are all oiled up and showing their body parts in different angles. Now, I am definitely in to art and as a model I know that this comes with the territory. But we most not forget that we are Queens.. We need to stop degrading ourselves for likes on the gram. You don't have to be naked to show the world you're beautiful. You my sister are an African Queen. I feel as if black women are only appreciated if they wear very provocative clothes or if they do naked photoshoots. To me, it's degrading and reminds me of the time that we couldn't ride the bus because we were black. Women were seen as servants. The black women that weren't servants were sex slaves. We are not objects, we are not meat and people need to stop looking at us as sex objects. BUT we need to start respecting ourselves first! A black woman is a woman first and it should not even be necessary to specify the colour but this is the society we live in and I feel like I had to share this.

The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California? It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you’ve passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave.

Just how long the ecosystems of Earth will be thrown into flux and disarray from anthropogenic climate change also depends on how much more of that change we choose to engineer—and perhaps how much we can manage to undo. But warming at the level necessary to fully melt ice sheets and glaciers and elevate sea level by several hundred feet promises to initiate rolling, radically transformative changes on a timescale measured not in decades or centuries or even millennia, but in the millions of years. Alongside that timeline, the entire lifespan of human civilization is rendered, effectively, an afterthought; and the much longer span of climate change becomes eternity.

She sucked in a tremulous breath. The subsequent damage since the fatal wreck was cosmic. One celestial quake and the timeline belonging to her had imploded in the heavens like a dying star. It was like falling into oblivion, the tattered remains of her life drifting aimlessly—unanchored in a vacuum of what was and what little remained.

I'd finally reached the end of myself, all my self-reliance and denial and pride unraveling into nothingness, leaving only a blank Alison-shaped space behind. It was finished. I was done. But just as I felt myself dissolving on the tide of my own self-condemnation, the dark waves receded, and I floated into a celestial calm. I saw the whole universe laid out before me, a vast shining machine of indescribable beauty and complexity. Its design was too intricate for me to understand, and I knew I could never begin to grasp more than the smallest idea of its purpose. But I sensed that every part of it, from quark to quasar, was unique and - in some mysterious way - significant. I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a peircing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase - nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it. I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose. And as long as I had a part in the music of the spheres, even if it was only a single grace not, I was not worthless. Nor was I alone. God help me, I prayed as I gathered up my raw and weary sense, flung them into the wormhole - And at last, found what I'd been looking for.

Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?” “Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and a live Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-sucking leech when I was minding my own business in the past.” “Don’t you call me dim!” “Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began. “Wait, when did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Help me out.” “Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husband that you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.” “I was getting to it,” I whined. “Then after not telling anyone anything and not being proactive—or even active!—you grow up to destroy the world and bring about eternal nuclear winter or whatever the heck that was and how do you deal with your foreknowledge of terrible events to come? Have sex!” “An affirmation of life?” Sinclair suggested. Never, I repeat, never had I loved him more. I was torn between slugging my sister and blowing my husband. Hmm. Laura might have a point about my priorities . . . but jeez. Look at him. Yum. “—even do it and what do you have to say for yourself? Huh?” “You’re just uptight, repressed, smug, antisex, and jealous, you Antichristing morally superior, fundamentally evil bitch.” Laura and Marc gasped. My husband groaned.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. But we`ll be gone by then, as will our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs won’t make a sound anymore. We’ve caused a lot of suffering, but we’ve also caused much else. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

Lying in the hotel bed, Hector conceded that, all through ’93, ’94, and ’95, an ever-widening river of good data, mixed with a steady ambient wash of self-importance, had anesthetized his grief. He’d needed that. But now a maw of emptiness and rage was opening beneath him. Idly, he rubbed his bare, trimmed chest beneath the sheets. He’d faithfully hit the gym through these past years of high-level consultancy, grunting out his misery over barbells and machines. His chest was broad and he wished beyond anything that the arm caressing it at this moment was Ricky’s, not his own. But that sunny, silly cutie, like a blond sliver of sunshine on the timeline that Hector envisioned as his life, had missed the drawbridge, along with Issy and Korie and a baleful lot of others. It had all happened in the very, very worst years of sickness and death, Clinton’s first term, overwhelming loss mingled confusingly with tidings of the coming respite.

How to start… My name: well, it's really Russell, but people know me as Spike, and these chapters are how I remember them. They are memories around the skinhead cult of the late 70s until now; Punks, Mods, and others are here. I'm not going to put everything in precise date order as some events and time-line are hard to completely put together. Some things I say may not be agreeable to everyone, as the truth will hurt, but they're from my own experience and how I feel.

If every life was a tree of, say, a billion branches, more being added all the time until you were at last dead in all timelines, then perhaps it was not the way you lived just one life that mattered; instead, perhaps it was the shape and beauty of your spiritual oak, the full pattern of all your lives, on which judgment was passed. For every life in which you made a ruinous or wicked decision, there was another parallel life where you had the chance to do the right thing.

It’s a lie, the first page of a book, because it masquerades as a beginning. A real beginning-the opening of something-when what you’re being offered is an arbitrary line in the sand. This story starts here. Pick a random event. Ignore whatever came before it or catch up later. Pretend the world stops when the book closes, or that a resolution isn’t simply another random moment on a curated timeline. But life isn’t like that, so books are dishonest. Maybe that’s why humans like them.

This should be easy because I’ve fallen out of love with Facebook. First, I want to be the kind of friend who hears about others’ milestones in person. I hate learning about major life events buried in a timeline between photos of fresh pedicures and pictures of lunch. When someone close to me has a baby or goes through emergency surgery or suffers a loss, they deserve more than a “like.” A click should never take the place of real interaction. Plus, I almost never visit anyone else’s page

Intelligence is for purposeful life application + utilization, not just esoterical conversation. Unequally distributed among souls, those found to have it in some capacity would be wise to lengthen it...by etching its voice into publication. Human timelines expire for the thinking, and thoughtless; the foolish and the wise; but their words will outlive them for lifetimes. Wisdom should be rewarded with an amplified and eternal voice. Unfortunately, foolishness has yet to respect any gag rule for its endless engagements.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multi cellar ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

it’s okay to be afraid. it’s okay if you don’t know who you are yet. we all have different timelines of discovering life, our own unique ways of figuring things out. maybe you still aren’t sure if the path you are taking is right for you. it’s okay, don’t judge yourself for not knowing everything all at once. we all find our way through falling and rising, by taking chances. there are no shortcuts to live this life, and if we keep on waiting for the right time or the right way to truly start living it, we will be waiting here forever.

It's a theory," Roald said. "Multiple universes, maybe. Parallel timelines. The idea that every possibility actually exists and that the life we're living is only one of them. There's also the famous butterfly effect. It's chaos theory, pretty heady stuff, but basically it says that a change in something as tiny as the flap of a butterfly's wings can eventually affect the path and strength of something as huge as a hurricane. In other words, if you could keep the butterfly from flying at a certain time and place, you might prevent a hurricane>

Coming from where we do, it’s a rough adjustment—living here.” He put a hesitant hand on her shoulder, his calluses scratching against the fabric of her dress. “It’s true what they say about life in the dark ages, you know: nasty, brutish, and short. You and I once took it for granted we would die as old people in our beds, but we have no such assurance now. I’ll help you how I can, Isabella; but I can’t guarantee that either of us will live even to see tomorrow. Life is worth fighting for, young lady. But don’t feel it is something you’re owed.

Worse, the concept of infinite parallel worlds said something both reassuring and profoundly disturbing about destiny. If every fate to which you could be subjected—those that befell you through no fault of your own and those that you could earn by your actions—unfurled across a multitude of timelines, then your life was like an immense tree of uncountable branches, some leafed and flourishing, others deformed and hung with sick or even poisonous foliage. In the sum of all your lives, you would have known uncountable joys—but also uncountable losses, periods of pain, and fear.

think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.

We've simply become too attached to work," I explained. "We've become too addicted to working and we need to balance our lives with a little idle activity like sitting on porches or chatting with neighbors." "I would HATE that!" she answered with a moo of disgust. "I LOVE to work! I can't stand just sitting around. Work makes me happy." This woman, by the way, is one of the most grounded, cheerful, and talented people I know. She's also not an outlier. I've had this conversation many times over the past few years with both friends and strangers and I often get some version of, "but I love to work!" in response. The question for me wasn't whether people enjoyed their work but whether they needed it. That was the question that drove my research. The question I asked hundreds of people around the country and the essential question of this book: Is work necessary? A lot of people will disagree with my next statement to the point of anger and outrage: Humans don't need to work in order to be happy. At this point, in our historical timeline, that claim is almost subversive. The assumption that work is at the core of what it means to lead a useful life underlies so much of our morality that it may feel I'm questioning our need to breathe or eat or sleep. But as I examined the body of research of what we know is good for all humans, what is necessary for all humans, I noticed a gaping hole where work was supposed to be. This lead me to ask some pointed questions about why most of us feel we can't be fully human unless we're working. Please note that by "work" I don't mean the activities we engage in to secure our survival: finding food, water, or shelter. I mean the labor we do to secure everything else beyond survival or to contribute productively to the broader society - the things we do in exchange for pay.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others. A moment that creates a “before” and an “after.” Maybe it’s when you meet your love or you figure out your life’s passion or you have your first child. Maybe it’s something wonderful. Maybe it’s something tragic. But when it happens, it tints your memories, shifts your perspective on your own life, and it suddenly seems as if everything you’ve been through falls under the label of “pre” or “post.

Idealization is the first step in the psychopath’s grooming process. Also known as love-bombing, it quickly breaks down your guard, unlocks your heart, and modifies your brain chemicals to become addicted to the pleasure centers firing away. The excessive flattery and compliments play on your deepest vanities and insecurities—qualities you likely don’t even know you possess. They will feed you constant praise and attention through your phone, Facebook Timeline, and email inbox. Within a matter of weeks, the two of you will have your own set of inside jokes, pet names, and cute songs. Looking back, you’ll see how insane the whole thing was. But when you’re in the middle of it, you can’t even imagine life without them.

Writing fiction twists your brain in knots. You get to experience the life of a compulsive liar. You are constantly double-checking for consistency, acting as continuity supervisor for your own imagination. You become a detective, picking through the diary of a suspect; checking for the slip up that undermines the story and breaks the alibi. You wake up sweating about some detail that wrecks the timeline, or breaches the established character of the person you invented. You craft wonderful, frightening people, who you fall in love with, but must discard. You find brilliant twists that you can’t use because they somehow subtly compromise the story. It drains you. You can’t sleep. You are preoccupied with minutia. It’s brilliant.

I daydreamed about BEING Anne. Traipsing through nineteenth-century meadows, reciting Romantic poetry (Keats was my fave, because he died with such gruesome panache.) One day, I started creating my own original scenarios of Anne doing her plucky orphan thing. But I didn’t want to deal with the annoying stuff from old-timey days, like sexism and polio, so I moved up the timeline and transported her into modern life as a free-spirited teen heiress. I’d imagine Anne flying to Hong Kong on her private jet, or spying on Communists while she performed gymnastics for the US Olympic Team. Or simple things, like attending a new high school where she’d enter a classroom wearing designer jeans and everyone would gasp at how pretty she was. “Her hair is so long and red. Can I be her best friend immediately?

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own timeline, there’s a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than the others. A moment that creates a “before” and an “after.” Maybe it’s when you meet your love or you figure out your life’s passion or you have your first child. Maybe it’s something wonderful. Maybe it’s something tragic. But when it happens, it tints your memories, shifts your perspective on your own life, and it suddenly seems as if everything you’ve been through falls under the label of “pre” or “post.” I used to think that my moment was when Jesse died. Everything about our love story seemed to have been leading up to that. And everything since has been in response. But now I know that Jesse never died. And I’m certain that this is my moment. Everything that happened before today feels different now, and I have no idea what happens after this. 

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

Timeline of History Years Before the Present 13.5 billion Matter and energy appear. Beginning of physics. Atoms and molecules appear. Beginning of chemistry. 4.5 billion Formation of planet Earth. 3.8 billion Emergence of organisms. Beginning of biology. 6 million Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees. 2.5 million Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools. 2 million Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species. 500,000 Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East. 300,000 Daily usage of fire. 200,000 Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa. 70,000 The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language. Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa. 45,000 Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian megafauna. 30,000 Extinction of Neanderthals. 16,000 Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna. 13,000 Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species. 12,000 The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent settlements. 5,000 First kingdoms, script and money. Polytheistic religions. 4,250 First empire – the Akkadian Empire of Sargon. 2,500 Invention of coinage – a universal money. The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’. Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’. 2,000 Han Empire in China. Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Christianity. 1,400 Islam. 500 The Scientific Revolution. Humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power. Europeans begin to conquer America and the oceans. The entire planet becomes a single historical arena. The rise of capitalism. 200 The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals. The Present Humans transcend the boundaries of planet Earth. Nuclear weapons threaten the survival of humankind. Organisms are increasingly shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection. The Future Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?

What I just presented to you was my timeline,” she explains. “And all of you are going to do your own timelines this week. Who here has childhood trauma?” Everyone raises his hand except for me, Adam, and Santa Claus, who probably didn’t hear the question. Lorraine stares at us incredulously. “Trauma comes from any abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Think of it this way: Every time a child has a need and it’s not adequately met, that causes what we define as trauma.” “But by that definition, is there anyone in the world who doesn’t have trauma?” I ask her. “Probably not,” she replies quickly. “We link and store any experience that brings us fear or pain because we need to retain that information to survive. All you have to do is touch a hot stove once and your behavior around hot stoves changes for the rest of your life—whether you remember getting burned or not. So think of anything in your childhood that was less than nurturing as a hot stove, and when you encounter something similar as an adult, it can trigger your learned survival response. We have a saying here: If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.

timelines register the pain of her loss for the first time. “I’m sorry, honey.” He remembers the day she died, eight weeks ago. She had become almost childlike by that point, her mind gone. He had to feed her, dress her, bathe her. But this was better than the time right before, when she had enough cognitive function left to be aware of her complete confusion. In her lucid moments, she described the feeling as being lost in a dreamlike forest—no identity, no sense of when or where she was. Or alternatively, being absolutely certain she was fifteen years old and still living with her parents in Boulder, and trying to square her foreign surroundings with her sense of place and time and self. She often wondered if this was what her mother felt in her final year. “This timeline—before my mind started to fracture—was the best of them all. Of my very long life. Do you remember that trip we took—I think it was during our first life together—to see the emperor penguins migrate? Remember how we fell in love with this continent? The way it makes you feel like you’re the only people in the world? Kind of appropriate, no?” She looks off camera, says, “What? Don’t be jealous. You’ll be watching this one day. You’ll carry the knowledge of every moment we spent together, all one hundred and forty-four years.” She looks back at the camera. “I need to tell you, Barry, that I couldn’t have made it this long without you. I couldn’t have kept trying to stop the inevitable. But we’re stopping today. As you know by now, I’ve lost the ability to map memory. Like Slade, I used the chair too many times. So I won’t be going back. And even if you returned to a point on the timeline where my consciousness was young and untraveled, there’s no guarantee you could convince me to build the chair. And to what end? We’ve tried everything. Physics, pharmacology, neurology. We even struck out with Slade. It’s time to admit we failed and let the world get on with destroying itself, which it seems so keen on doing.” Barry sees himself step into the frame and take a seat beside Helena. He puts his arm around her. She snuggles into him, her head on his chest. Such a surreal sensation to now remember that day when she decided to record a message for the Barry who would one day merge into his consciousness. “We have four years until doomsday.” “Four years, five months, eight days,” Barry-on-the-screen says. “But who’s counting?” “We’re going to spend that time together. You have those memories now. I hope they’re beautiful.” They are. Before her mind broke completely, they had two good years, which they lived free from the burden of trying to stop the world from remembering. They lived those years simply and quietly. Walks on the icecap to see the Aurora Australis. Games, movies, and cooking down here on the main level. The occasional trip to New Zealand’s South Island or Patagonia. Just being together. A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living. Helena was right. They were the best years of his lives too. “It’s odd,” she says. “You’re watching this right now, presumably four years from this moment, although I’m sure you’ll watch it before then to see my face and hear my voice after I’m gone.” It’s true. He did. “But my moment feels just as real to me as yours does to you. Are they both real? Is it only our consciousness that makes it so? I can imagine you sitting there in four years, even though you’re right beside me in this moment, in my moment, and I feel like I can reach through the camera and touch you. I wish I could. I’ve experienced over two hundred years, and at the end of it all, I think Slade was right. It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so,

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

From the Author Matthew 16:25 says, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  This is a perfect picture of the life of Nate Saint; he gave up his life so God could reveal a greater glory in him and through him. I first heard the story of Operation Auca when I was eight years old, and ever since then I have been inspired by Nate’s commitment to the cause of Christ. He was determined to carry out God’s will for his life in spite of fears, failures, and physical challenges. For several years of my life, I lived and ministered with my parents who were missionaries on the island of Jamaica. My experiences during those years gave me a passion for sharing the stories of those who make great sacrifices to carry the gospel around the world. As I wrote this book, learning more about Nate Saint’s life—seeing his spirit and his struggles—was both enlightening and encouraging to me. It is my prayer that this book will provide a window into Nate Saint’s vision—his desires, dreams, and dedication. I pray his example will convince young people to step out of their comfort zones and wholeheartedly seek God’s will for their lives. That is Nate Saint’s legacy: changing the world for Christ, one person and one day at a time.   Nate Saint Timeline 1923 Nate Saint born. 1924 Stalin rises to power in Russia. 1930 Nate’s first flight, aged 7 with his brother, Sam. 1933 Nate’s second flight with his brother, Sam. 1936 Nate made his public profession of faith. 1937 Nate develops bone infection. 1939 World War II begins. 1940 Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister. 1941 Nate graduates from Wheaton College. Nate takes first flying lesson. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 1942 Nate’s induction into the Army Air Corps. 1943 Nate learns he is to be transferred to Indiana. 1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by U.S. 1946 Nate discharged from the Army. 1947 Nate accepted for Wheaton College. 1948 Nate and Marj are married and begin work in Eduador. Nate crashes his plane in Quito. 1949 Nate’s first child, Kathy, is born. Germany divided into East and West. 1950 Korean War begins. 1951 Nate’s second child, Stephen, is born. 1952 The Saint family return home to the U.S. 1953 Nate comes down with pneumonia. Nate and Henry fly to Ecuador. 1954 The first nuclear-powered submarine is launched. Nate’s third child, Phillip, is born. 1955 Nate is joined by Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian. Nate spots an Auca village for the first time. Operation Auca commences. 1956 The group sets up camp four miles from the Auca territory. Nate and the group are killed on “Palm Beach”.

And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.”  “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.”     48   Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.