The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 40 The Island
mistake."
Our numbers were right. An hour doesn't pass when I don't
check them again. The Island just had— enemies, I guess.
Victims, anyway.
I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To
see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a
weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…
I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.
"Maybe there was a war," I mumble. "Maybe it wanted the real
estate. Or maybe it was just some— family squabble."
"Maybe didn't know," Dix suggests. "Maybe thought those
coordinates were empty."
Why would you think that, I wonder. Why would you even care?
And then it dawns on me: he doesn't, not about the Island,
anyway. No more than he ever did. He's not inventing these rosy
alternatives for himself.
My son is trying to comfort me.
I don't need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself
believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little
while I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and
unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist
at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not
understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.
But I'm better now.
It's over: another build, another benchmark, another
irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to
completion. It doesn't matter how successful we are. It doesn't
matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a
meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best.
There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on
forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your
goddamned superhighway behind us.
I still have so much to learn.
At least my son is here to teach me.