"It hurt him to talk about it, she felt, but she guessed he didn't know how much, or how. She could tell he didn't unpack this, much, or maybe ever. He said that people like Ash made their whole lives about it. Dressed in black and marked themselves, but for them it was more about other species, the other great dying, than the 80 percent.
No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, anti-biotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they'd changed things just by being there.
The shadows on the lawn were black holes, bottomless, or like velvet had been spread, perfectly flat."
-- William Gibson, The Peripheral
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