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Most of Phobos and Deimos was written years ago. But for these quotes and poems between chapters, I’ve left most of them to be figured out as I go. It gives me a fun creative project every few months, lets me throw a little extra spackle on the world-building, and sometimes it ends up being more relevant to current events. Child mortality, for example. Eugenicists like RFK Jr. don’t seem to mind some extra (millions of) dead babies, and I wonder why. Or maybe I don’t. When you don’t imagine other people to be fully real, it’s easy to treat them like scores in some cosmic video game. Anyways, I, and Rivkah Odomo, don’t care much for that attitude.
This is the end of chapter nine, and we’re going back to once-weekly updates starting next week.
There is a number
For how many babies survive
It fits in a tidy little equation
Rate of disease before first nanite procedure
Average Nutrition
Doctors per patient, Anticipated childcare costs
It’s just algebra after that.
You see,
Low infant mortality isn’t how you get people to colonise other planets.
- Rivkah Odomo, from "Hope Was What Remained in Schrodinger's Box (A Book of Nonsense Poetry)," 2511
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