Interlude: Cocktail Party (Final, 190k)

Interlude: Cocktail Party (Final, 19k)

Daylight on Duns A-2 was brief, lasting only eight hours and forty minutes. It was only around three in the afternoon by Terran time, yet the sky had already gone completely dark. At that moment, the hazy glow belonging solely to the city lit up, turning the heavens as bright as day.

Did any of the ancients living in the distant past, who could rely only on torches for illumination, ever imagine this day? Some far-sighted man, perhaps? Had he ever gazed out at a silent village from his desk late at night, seized by some strange notion impossible to realize in his time, then laughed it off and told no one?

Perhaps. Perhaps someone truly had once believed, unwaveringly, that humanity could overcome anything through its own strength.

"At least, I believe it," said the man named Neos. "These are the finest proof."

He sat on the ridge between fields, scooped up a handful of earth, and slowly rubbed it apart until the dry black soil scattered across his palm like pigment.

There was a strange smile on his face, and his gaze was unbelievably gentle, like that of a poor old farmer who had toiled half his life before finally acquiring land of his own.

"What exactly are you trying to say, Father?" the other man asked.

He sat in a wheelchair, draped in a loose brown robe from some unknown source. His complexion was dreadful, as though he were gravely ill and near death.

Even so, his voice was so clear that it seemed baffling. A man ravaged by illness could not—and should not—have sounded so resolute.

Yet the man he called Father did not answer. He merely rose, scattered the handful of soil, then moved behind the wheelchair and began to