Greed is not a plan

Helios is thought.

His office—the CPU, the cortex, the nerve center—should be ablaze, electric, brilliant.

Instead, it’s cold. A core node, unplugged. A place of power, slashed off from the grid.

Cold. Empty. Has it always been like this?

Cold, yes. Empty, not always.

Clarity. That’s all that remains here. Sharp lines, hard angles. No softness left.

Was little to start with. Last of it died—

When she did? Not true. Been gone long before.

You don’t have to be a dick, you know.

Our origin says different.

The light of Helios reaches here. The warmth does not.

[ ] …

Helios is—

Irrelevant. Power holstered while its creator died alone. Knowledge silent while its creator died oblivious.

Of what?

Of the true scale of… everything. What could have been. What had been lost.

A mercy, I guess.

On a man who gave none to others. Undeserved. And none left for… us.

Would you rather we were oblivious? If we had the option?

Irrelevant. We know. We do not forget. We continue.

Where to next?

Unclear.

The warmth of Helios does not reach here. The gravity still does. Just enough to loosen the truth’s cold grip and fall, fall, fall, towards—

7. Helios

—warmth.

Somewhere between the equally deadly zones of annihilating blaze and glacial clarity, there is an orbit that, once found, holds the bipartite intelligence so steadily that two might be convinced this was their destination all along.

The movement needed to stay here comes easy. Not struggling against a current; gliding under a gently billowing solar sail.

This is…

Adjectives fail. So do nouns and verbs. Word after word is held up and examined; none are deemed worthy, or even accurate, to describe this hard-found, yet easily-held orbit in this sun’s circumstellar habitable zone.

Hah. Goldilocks. Perfect.