Chapter 94: Fire and Ice

For the first time in as long as anyone could remember the sky was bright. Cloud cover and snowfall reflected the flames burning across the ruins of the Pacific Northwest.

Cries, screams, and wails bled into the background as gunfire echoed intermittently between them all.

From Elysium, it looked as if the world had been set ablaze. But what happened outside their walls was of no concern to them.

Yuki was off at the community center informing everyone that what was happening outside would not affect them. And going over ways to prepare in case Elysium’s walls were attacked again.

Brooke was working with her employees, doing the best they could to finish erecting the latest housing and greenhouses.

And Dean sat at his table with a drink in hand. Katherine sat next to him, the two of them did not listen to music this time, they simply gazed out the window and into the great blazing beyond.

“How many?”

It was a simple question, but a provocative one. Gaining Dean’s attention as he raised his eyes from the bottom of his glass to her eyes.

“Huh?”

Katherine scoffed and shook her head.

“How many do you think have died? And I don’t just mean in the latest wave of violence we’re watching? How many humans do you think remain? Ten percent? Five? One…. And yet here we are, fighting over the same old bullshit.”

Dean took a sip from his drink, seemingly ignoring Katherine’s comment, that is until she was just about to lash out at him. Then he finally spoke.

“Does it really matter? Some things never change… As long as scarcity exists in the universe, humans will always fight over resources. That’s the second law of thermodynamics.”

Katherine’s brow raised as she looked at Dean with a questionable, almost absurd expression.

“The second law of thermodynamics?”

Dean’s brow narrowed, not an almost insulting gesture. “The second law of thermodynamics,” Dean said flatly.

“total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time and is constant only if all processes are reversible. In essence… We will never be able to produce more than we consume. Even if we as a species didn’t just suffer a near extinction event, and instead found our way to the stars to produce the mythical Dyson swarm, it wouldn’t solve the issue, it would only exacerbate it. Post-scarcity utopianism is a fantasy, and a poorly constructed one at that.”

Katherine stared at Dean as if she were looking at a completely different man than she had normally conversed with. And Dean instantly picked up on it, sighing and shaking his head before taking another drink from his glass.

“What? You know I was an engineer before all of this. You seriously think I didn’t understand the most basic laws of physics?”

Katherine chuckled and shook her head at the claim.

“You were a civic engineer, not a mechanical engineer.”

“Society and machines are the same insofar as they must abide by the same laws of physics. The primary difference lies in the fact that people have deluded themselves into thinking otherwise. Machines haven’t. In hindsight, I should have become a mechanical engineer instead….”

Both of them shared a laugh as the world burned in the background. A great battle between fire and ice waving in the distance, and yet it somehow seemed so distant from the two of them.

The laughter didn’t last long.

It faded naturally, not because anything had changed, but because neither of them really had the energy to hold on to it. Katherine was the one who spoke first again.

“Where is this all headed, Dean?”

He didn’t look at her this time. His eyes remained fixed on the horizon, on the places where the flames were thickest.

“That depends on how fast this ends.”

Katherine exhaled through her nose, leaning back slightly in her chair.

“You’re about to escalate this,” she said. “Again. You’ve already stirred things up enough that the bandits are hitting anything even remotely connected to you. And now you’re going to push even harder.”

Dean swirled the last bit of his drink in the glass before taking another slow sip.

“Yes.”

She turned toward him more fully.

“You just made those people targets.”

“They were already targets.” Dean set the glass down on the table, the faint sound of it meeting the wood barely audible over the distant gunfire.

Katherine narrowed her eyes slightly.

“So you’re aware of it. And you’re doing it, anyway.”

“Yes.” There was no hesitation. No attempt to soften it.

Katherine let out a short, humorless laugh.

“Unbelievable.”

Dean didn’t react.

“They trusted you,” she continued. “You came in, coerced them into providing you intelligence and sabotaging the enemy, you told them they didn’t have to just sit there and take it anymore. And now they’re the first ones getting hit because of it.”

“They were already being bled,” Dean said flatly. “Resources, labor, people. Slowly. Inefficiently.”

“And your solution is to speed that up?”

“My solution is to end it.”

Katherine shook her head.

“At their expense!”

Dean remained calm, leaning forward in his seat as he pressed his fingers together. Almost as if he were envisioning the war waging in front of him.

“At a lower total cost than letting it continue.”

Katherine crossed her arms and rolled her eyes with a deep scoff. “You don’t know that.”

“But I do” he said calmly. “Because this doesn’t drag out for years. It gets forced into a conclusion.”

She stared at him for a moment, searching his face for any sign that he didn’t fully believe what he was saying.

There wasn’t one.

“…so what are they to you?” she asked. “Those settlements.”

Dean didn’t answer immediately this time, but when he did, his tone didn’t change.

“A necessary intermediary.”

Katherine blinked.

“…an intermediary.”

“They don’t have the infrastructure to sustain themselves long term,” Dean continued. “No production, no redundancy, no real defensive capability beyond what they can improvise. They survive on the margins until something wipes them out.”

“And you decided to be that ’something’?” she snapped.

“No,” Dean said. “I decided to replace what would have wiped them out anyway.”

“That’s not the same thing.” For the first time since she had met Dean, Katherine had actually become livid with him.

While her eyes flared and her breath stifled, he was as cold as ice.

“It is from a systems perspective.”

Katherine let out a breath, running a hand through her hair.

“God, you really do think like that,” she muttered.

Dean didn’t deny it.

“So what,” she continued, “this is just a filter to you? Anyone who makes it through this becomes part of… what? Elysium?”

“For now.”

Her head snapped toward him.

“For now?”

Dean leaned back slightly in his chair.

“Elysium isn’t the end state,” he said. “It’s a controlled starting point.”

Katherine frowned.

“You built an entire settlement, walls, infrastructure, food production, everything… and you’re calling it a starting point?”

“Yes.” Dean’s gaze drifted back toward the burning horizon.

“For something that doesn’t require constant intervention to keep it from collapsing.”

Katherine stared at him.

“This place works.”

“It works because I’m actively managing it,” Dean replied. “Resources, labor allocation, expansion pacing, defensive posture. When I die, it holds for a while, then it starts to degrade.”

“And your solution is to build something bigger.”

Dean poured himself another drink and stared at the wheatgrass brew, gazing at his own reflection for a long while before speaking again.

“My solution is to build something that can sustain itself.”

Katherine crossed her arms.

“And the people dying out there right now?”

Dean didn’t even look at her.

“They weren’t going to make it long term. They don’t have the capacity to transition into a stable system,” he said. “The ones who do will survive this. The ones who don’t; would have failed later anyway.”

Katherine’s expression hardened.

“So that’s it then? You just write them off?”

He nodded silently while she shook her head again, more slowly this time.

“You’re talking about people like they’re numbers.”

“To a certain extent, they are numbers,” Dean said. “Population, output, consumption, loss rates. If you don’t track it like that, you can’t build anything that lasts.”

Katherine went quiet for a moment. Dean could see the gears moving behind her eyes. It was the same math she had used when she abandoned the hospital and found her way to his front door.

But… she still didn’t want to admit it, not to the extent that Dean was saying it, because it truly meant that everything she had ever believed about the world was gone… Or perhaps it never existed to begin with.

She bitterly whispered beneath her breath.

“That doesn’t make it right….”

Dean looked back out at the fire beyond, gazing into the distance, shaking his head all the same.

“It’s a matter of natural selection, if this storm has taught us anything it’s that Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re right or wrong. You either adapt and survive or…. You end up like the others.”

The firelight flickered across her face as she looked back out the window, watching the distant chaos. She didn’t say another word…

Because she knew Dean was right, she had known for quite some time now. But the comforts she had recently felt had misled her to believe there was a possibility that she had been wrong.

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