Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Chapter 20: Star Whirs: The Woke Awokens
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch
Damn. Another long chapter.
& mopes around with the retard herd. He's pissy, only sometimes taking a question or two, before telling Dr. Sev (the only ROSA he'll let near him) to fuck off. I'm surprised & isn't wearing a leather jacket and smoking a Marlboro.
Ampersand gave unhelpful, minimalist answers if he answered at all and tended to lose his patience quickly, telling Cora to remove them and herself from the room, and that was when he was feeling generous.
Sigh. Seems there's a division in the herd. Slightly more than half side with & and the other with another alpha named Esperas. Over what? I don't know. Team Esperas won't engage with Cora. Boo hoo.
Ampersand allowed that one unique trait of the Fremda group was that they seemed to specialize in the arts or sciences, at least as a human might conceive it. No grunts, no peons, no worker bees—all seemed born (well, “born”) and bred thinkers.
Uh huh.
Cora deduces that when & uses the word “phyle” to describe the herd, it's actually Greek for “clan” or “tribe”. Was that in his algorithm? Why wouldn't he just say “tribe”? Why complicate things? Damn, this is stupid.
Fuuuucckkk. Now page after page of this kind of stupid etymology and translation between hooomans, and the albino dragon-raptors. Look, if ANY of this shit comes into play, I'll explain it, but I'm not about to waste y'alls time with this tripe. Basically, two types of dragon speak, the guttural noises and the psychic, ok?
But poor & had his psychic link removed by slavers.
Read that again without cringing, if you can.
Who removed his telepathy? “Slavers. Similars. Militarists.” What did they do to him? “Exploitation. Slavery. Torture.” How did he escape? “By chance.” He refused to elaborate on any of these points, as knowing the details would not aid any human in their current objectives.
“Irrelevant.”
What? Why? That's a much more interesting story than this horseshit. It actually sounds like something happens. Why couldn't she had written that tale?
Ok. I get it. This is the part of the story where we humanize the dragon-raptor and start developing fee-fees for it. The Bronte-esque prose that Lindsay is trying but failing to emulate, right? (I've never read anyhting by the Brontes but they're women, and it's going to be filled with introspection and emotional exploration, right? Don't care)
I'm pausing here, and going to go get some rum and Coke.
*sips Ahhhh! That's good stuff. I will now do this review while increasingly becoming drunk. I feel Lindsay would approve as she wrote while drunk.
Now where the hell was I? Oh yeah, this shit.
Ope! There's a third language amongst the aliens.
There was a third language in their repertoire—Ampersand called it “high language,” but owing to its intimate nature, this one was not being employed by any of the Fremda group at this time. When Cora asked him what made “high language” different from the other two, he responded that it was “irrelevant to humans.” A human could neither comprehend it, nor engage in it, and therefore, it was a waste of time to try to explain it.
Goddamit, Lindsay! Then why bring it up?
& tells Cora to fuck off.
Special Agent Flannel wants Cora to get James “&” Dean to talk to more people. Like the Defense department, but broody brood & ain't hip to that. Agent Flannel presses Cora to find out why they're
really here. Why are they sticking around?
Cora says she thinks & and Eperas need to sissy fight something out. Flannel wags his finger and warns, she had better find out what.
Insert vapid cunt inner monologue.
...she was really, really fucking sick of people underestimating her.
Well I for one won't around my pancakes, I can tell you that!
She grabbed a Nutri-Grain bar from the café, a notepad from an office, and a Harry Potter book from the little makeshift library.
Uh oh. Sorry Lindsay, between shipping this book off and the printing, JK has become a pariah. Ten lashes for you, transphobe!
Ok, the plan. To get info, she has to get on &'s good side, which means leaving him the hell alone. So she does the opposite because she's a woman and they never leave men alone. She parks her fat ass at the door reading her gay book, and “acting as a bouncer” telling people to fuck off when they come around wanting to ask questions.
For the most part, if she told people to fuck off on the part of their alien guests, they went with it without much protest.
See? Though it worries me a little Lindsay and I are now using the same wording.
Except Dr. Sev. He wants to know about “The Great Filter.”
Fuck. I'm going to have to explain this ain't I?
“A question, a thought experiment about why intelligent life isn’t common in the universe. Statistically, if we exist, and they exist, and in terms of the greater galaxy we are not far apart at all, then intelligent life must not be that rare. Therefore, in the thirteen odd billion years of existence before now, the galaxy should have been colonized a hundred times over, or at least recognizably explored, but it hasn’t. Let’s say the Great Filter is a big philosophical question in astronomy. Either the filter is behind us and intelligence is astronomically rare, or it’s in front of us and advanced civilizations just don’t last that long. Ask him if they have an answer to this question.”
It didn’t take Cora long to decide that something about their Genome was the main point of disagreement between Ampersand and Esperas.
One wants to eat it, and the other wants to fuck it, right? Disgusting creatures.
Then she started doing something she’d been meaning to do for a little while: math.
Mike Stoklasa, “What?”
It had been Luciana who had explained to her the basics of Einstein’s theory of special relativity on the plane to Colorado Springs, using Ender’s Game, a book Cora had not read...
Oh fuck you, Lindsay! I can't take this shit. I read Ender's Game, I get what she's getting at, but you don't need the sequel (which where this is laid out) Speaker of the Dead, to explain relativity. ALSO Orson Scott Card is on the lib shit list because he opposed gay marriage! How is the woke crowd not burning her book at his point? Seriously, what the hell?! Fucking miserable stupid assed book!
“So if he’s telling the truth, that’s a 350-year age discrepancy,” said Luciana. “In lived time, he’s 350 years younger than he should be.”
And?
Her mouth went dry, and she looked back up at Ampersand, who was now back to acting as though she were not in the room. If those numbers were right, Ampersand was “born” in A.D. 1045.
And?
Short answer, she hadn't thought of it being a long time until she put a year on it. Derp! And we go and on with this pointless bullshit. Who cares?! You've got space raptors, Lindsay! DOOOOOO SOMETHING!!!
But here's why. Virtue signaling. This is why her book isn't getting burned. The old religious monsters of olde.
Putting a number to the year did further illuminate why Ampersand assumed humans would treat the Fremda group barbarously. She couldn’t imagine any alien civilization who had tripped across medieval Europe giving it a charitable interpretation. Still, it had been a while since AP European History, and she couldn’t remember what exactly was going on in the world in 1352. She didn’t have much, but fortunately the piddlin’ little makeshift library in the complex had an old 1980s hardcover edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
The following morning, Cora returned to her post next to the door, now with a Nutri-Grain bar, her notepad, and four volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica: the Krasnokamsk-Menadra volume for medieval Europe, the Delusion-Frenssen volume for King Edward III and French history, the Number-Prague volume for Paris and House Plantagenet, and the Bayou-Ceanothus volume for the Black Death/
That's some piddlin' little library. BTW Wikipedia was around in 2007, and wifi. Why not use that? Also, the year the iPhone cane out. Stupid, author.
Here we go.
Renewed religious fervor and fanaticism bloomed in the wake of the Black Death. Some Europeans targeted groups such as Jews, foreigners, beggars, lepers, and Romani, thinking that they were to blame. Attacks on Jewish communities became commonplace. In February of 1349, the citizens of Strasbourg murdered half of their population of 2,000 Jews. In August of 1349, the Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were exterminated.
Guys, I'm seriously considering stopping this review. This woke, virtue-signaling is just too much.
Sigh. I''ll do it for DHI. Go, Dead Horses!
Remember the two curious raptors from before, Woodward and Bernstein? They want to know what she's reading. So Cora is going to take wokeness intergalactic. Enter Eaperas. He and & get into a non-physical tiff, and Cora fucks off down to the autopsy room, where Cefo's corpse, and the sack of egg is. She pets it, and describes the texture like a cat's tongue. Gross. Then Esperas nearly bitch chokes her, and she's told not to touch it.
We end the chapter with an article from daddeh. What did the president know and when did he know it? Fill in the blanks. Leftists talking points #35, circa Bush Era.
When did he know it? The following recording shows that he knew as early as 2004.
Your move, Dubya.
End of Chapter