The Counter-Offer

It was Silas who broke the silence, his voice a low rasp. ‘So, what now? We just…drift? Wait for the cosmic garbage collectors to sweep us up?’

‘No,’ Kenji said, his voice strangely calm. The initial shock had passed, replaced by a chilling clarity. ‘This isn’t an ending. It’s a negotiation. We made an offer. It was rejected. Now we make a counter-offer.’

Reyes looked at him, a flicker of hope in his eyes. ‘A counter-offer? What do we have that a being like that could possibly want?’

‘We have the one thing it doesn’t,’ Kenji replied, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across his face. ‘We have nothing to lose. We are, as it so helpfully pointed out, insufficient. And in that, there is a strange kind of freedom. A freedom to be…unreasonable.’

He turned to the console, his fingers flying across the holographic interface. ‘We can’t fight it. We can’t impress it. But we can annoy it. We can become a splinter in the thumb of infinity. We can be so utterly, defiantly, and gloriously insufficient that it has no choice but to pay attention to us.’