Utopia

Chapter Twenty - Darkness Travels Faster

They spoke, and she supposed she listened, but it was in the sort of way she listened to the radio while driving in an unfamiliar city.

Kira just didn't understand why she was here in the first goddamn place. She didn't understand why they always wanted to interview the goddamn team, she was the goddamn speechwriter, she didn't do interviews. But Susannah had considered her arguments and told her she was going, so out had come the same interview outfit.

Well, the lawyer could make her go, but none could make her speak.

Kira had crossed the stage and taken her seat like a rockslide. She sat now like that jumbled collection at the bottom of the incline. And why not? Why should Kira sit prim and pretty telling the prop and his audience things that would delight them.

They talked in circles. They only ever talked in circles. A question, an offer, a little doubt, a laugh. Politics were supposed to be cutthroat. It wasn't as if there weren't still riots. Marches. Protests. But they seemed to live in a sort of bubble—brief and fragile. This moment and then the next and in the time between it all just carried on.

Politics, law, society as a whole: it mostly just existed in the abstract. Places, people around you, these were real. All else was the basis for narcissism. Irrelevant. Trivial. There were places most people would never see, laws people could go their whole lives without brushing.

They were speaking about laws like the consistency of the sun. Like they alone might fix anything at all.

Hank was going on excitedly about social reforms and green energy as if he had any grander ability than speaking and hoping others might listen. He was only a prop. He was the table they sat at, the very tie he wore. Effectively, he might as well strip himself bare and rant at the feet of Abraham.

Their host-prop was nodding. He had the same plastered smile that he'd had for most of the evening.

His smile, their conversation, the lights, the rough friction of her shirt—it all scraped like sandpaper across the softest parts of her. They crawled beneath her skin, and she had to stop herself from reaching into her skin by her nails and tearing out each layer until she found satisfaction. She had to stop herself from crying out, from keening in an unending lamentation of the things she couldn't discuss. Of the things the props thought they were discussing.

They thought they understood, and that, she thought, was the worst of it. They still only spoke in theories and hypotheses. They still spoke in terms of trust and motivation, but Kira had seen it. And now she was left to describe it to them in one of those games where everything but the word itself could be used.

"You do realize we made it all up, right?" Kira asked, breaking in due to her own frustration and speaking like her every word were obvious. And if she was slightly off from the conversation, well, she didn't notice. "Like, it's all bull—" she used a word that had Susannah saying her name sharply. "We don't drop a giant quarter in a giant slot to make the Earth spin. We don't bury gold to make crops grow. We don't burn offerings to the sky to make the rain fall or the sun keep shining.

"It all just works. We," she gestured around the room with an open hand, "are all just here. And if we stopped being here, everything else would just keep going on because these systems we created have no real power."

The way they looked at her was hardly encouraging. Hank had simply frozen: his mouth still forming his sentence, his hand just starting to curl away from his gesture. Susannah's hand disappeared beneath the table and dug a warning into Kira's thigh that went unnoticed. Their host still wore his plastered smile, but there was a quizzical tilt to his brows.