“We’ve had almost a thousand years to adapt to our environment, and my tolerance for heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium is far higher than your own, but look at us. We’re small and wiry, with bad teeth, fragile bones, and a life expectancy of barely seventy years. We monitor the toxicity of our farmland daily, we distill every drop of water we drink, and still we suffer massive levels of neural damage, mental retardation, and birth defects. Even the air we breathe is our enemy; our third most common cause of death is lung cancer-lung cancer, seventeen centuries after Lao Than perfected his vaccine! And we face all of that, Admiral, all those health hazards and consequences, despite nine hundred years—almost a millennium—of adaptation. Can you truly imagine what it was like for the first generation? Or the second?”
80,000 years ago, man’s survival in a vast uncharted land depended on the possession of fire. / For those early humans, fire was an object of great mystery, since no one had mastered its creation. Fire had to be stolen from nature, it had to be kept alive - sheltered from wind and rain, guarded from rival tribes. / Fire was a symbol of power and a means of survival. The tribe who possessed fire, possessed life.
Fire up the laser, Agnes. Let’s get that hand out of amber.
“Oh, nothing much . . . except for the fact that I used to be a small arms instructor at Saganami Island, and I happen to know he’s qualified High Expert with the plasma carbine.”
Good morning David, you’re still on the island, quite a distance from the house.
Well, excuse me, Miss “I’m-so-smart-I-can’t-wait-to-go-to-the-Island!”
Within a month, all of the StateSec survivors had been relocated onto an island and provided with the wherewithal to set up reasonably comfortable if austere living quarters, along with a sufficient food supply brought in once a week under heavy guard.
The armed forces of Torch placed no guards on the island itself, and didn’t even maintain a naval patrol beyond a small number of vessels. But the more adventurous of the StateSec forces who experimented with the possibility of trying to escape by sea soon gave it up. It turned out that the lifeforms in Torch’s warm oceans were every bit as exuberant as the ones in its tropical rain forests. Especially the predator that looked like a ten-meter long cross between a lobster and a manta ray, and whose dietary preferences seemed to exclude rocks but absolutely nothing else.
This alpha predator of yours, doctor, do you really think he has a chance?
Dinosaurs… eat man. Woman inherits the earth.
His High Exaltedness, the great Jabba the Hutt, has decreed that you are to be terminated immediately. You will therefore be taken to the Dune Sea and cast into the Pit of Carkoon, the nesting place of the all-powerful Sarlacc. In his belly, you will find a new definition of pain and suffering, as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.
I have bruises in my hair.
Well, where DOESN’T it hurt?
“Your left cheek took the brunt of it, Skipper. The muscle damage isn’t as bad as I was afraid, but the soft tissue damage is severe. It also broke the zygomatic arch—the cheekbone just below your eye—and you broke your nose when you went down. More seriously, there’s near total nerve mortality from your eye to your chin and reaching around to a point about a centimeter in front of your ear. It missed your ear structure and aural nerves, luckily, and you should still have at least partial control of your jaw muscles on that side.”
We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.
I’ve been frozen for 30 years. I’ve got to see if my bits and pieces are still working.
You masturbate more than anyone on the planet.
Oh, God! I can’t know that!
There are Some Things That Man Is Not Meant To Know. This weapon will help you kill those things.
What we need is a diversion. I say Zoe gets naked.
Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.