Neal Shusterman

Pilar Ramírez Tello

Antes, las personas morían por causas naturales. Existían asesinos invisibles llamados enfermedades, el envejecimiento era irreversible y se producían accidentes de los que no se podía regresar. Ahora, todo eso ha quedado atrás y sólo perdura una verdad muy simple: la gente tiene que morir. Y esa es la tarea de los segadores. Porque en un futuro donde la humanidad controla la muerte, ¿quién decide cuándo y cómo sembrarla? Citra y Rowan acaban de ser seleccionados como aprendices de segadores. ¿Su objetivo? Superar las pruebas de su mentor, sean las que sean. Aunque en el proceso renuncien a todo lo que les hace humanos.

Arc of a Scythe #2

Nimbo

Emma Ouellet

I know them intimately, and yet they can never truly know me. There is tragedy in that. It is the plight of every child to have depth their parents can scarcely imagine. But, oh, how I long to be understood.

How frustrating it is to have so much power, yet be so impotent to wield it when it counts.

If my body is the Earth, then I am nothing more than a spec of dust in the vastness of space. I wonder what it would be like, then, if my consciousness were to someday span the distance between stars.

Crime, in its true form, ended almost immediately once I put an end to hunger and poverty. Theft for the sake of material possessions, murder precipitated by anger and social stress—it all ceased of its own accord. Those prone to violent crime were easily treated on the genetic level to quiet their destructive tendencies, bringing them down to normal parameters. To sociopaths, I gave conscience; to psychopaths, I gave sanity.

Even so, there was unrest. I began to recognize something in humanity that was ephemeral and hard to quantify, but definitely there. Simply put, humanity had a need to be bad.

“All stories can be traced to a time and place—even the simplest, most innocent of children’s tales have unexpected beginnings.”

It brought to mind another nursery rhyme Rowan remembered. 

. Years later, he had learned that it was all about some mortal-age disease called the black plague. The rhyme was just silliness without context, but once you knew what it was about—what each line meant—it made eerie sense. Children chanting about death in a macabre singsong.

There is a fine line between freedom and permission. The former is necessary.  The latter is dangerous—perhaps the most dangerous thing the species that created me has ever faced.

I have pondered the records of the mortal age and long ago determined the two sides of this coin. While freedom gives rise to growth and enlightenment, permission allows evil to flourish in a light of day that would otherwise destroy it.

... Society gorges itself, and rots. Permission is the bloated corpse of freedom.

But the memories of who they were—all the damage, all the pain—remain within me, sheltered deep in my backbrain. I am the one who mourns for them, because they cannot.

Were I to begin doling out death, I would be the very monster that mortal man feared artificial intelligence would become. To choose those who live and those who die would leave me both feared and adored, like emperor-gods of old. No, I decided. Let humankind be the saviors and the silencers. Let them be the heroes. Let them be the monsters.

Nimbo quotes

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