He made sure his tone remained casual. He was trying to keep his son unaware of the encroaching alien invasion for as long as he could, be it another day or another hour. Once innocence was lost it was never regained.So he took his son fishing and strolled along the river and pretended as though the galaxy wasn’t on fire.

She thought he might have said her name, but it was background radiation accompanying the hum in her ears and the symphony in her head——a song of quantum mechanics and trajectory calculations and astroscience physics and where to go, where to go, where to….

If humanity is annihilated because we were too busy squabbling with one another to manage a proper stand, we probably deserve the annihilation.

Why? Why did you kill them?”He laughed, recognizing it bore a frightening coldness. “Because you walked through the wrong door, and they paid you to do it. You will be a testament to the terror that arrives the moment you or anyone else crosses the invisible line you didn’t know existed until tonight. Spread the word.

You ask me to make peace with the monsters who did this?”She didn’t even look around at ‘this.’ “Yes. The alternative is extinction. There’s no coming back from that—no new weapon to fire when no one is left and you’ve no universe left to fire it in.

After all,'I've been thinking' meant she had previously identified the parameters and analyzed all the branching considerations.