Hope.

God. I don’t even know why I bother writing in here anymore. Catharsis? Habit? Yori says keeping a journal reduces stress. Says it’ll be good for my “mental health,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. We all know there’s nothing I can do to stave off my Huntington’s, short of going back to those things…

Anyway, the girls are gone. Amma and Shkaht ran away before Neci had a chance to chop off their tentacles.

I can’t believe Neci tried to go through with it without the group’s consensus! It’s fucking degenerates like her that doomed humanity in the first place. There’s no reasoning with such people. All they have is their hate and misguided hopes. They hope that if we kidnap a few human looking constructs everything will go back to the way it was before the war—hope, beyond all reason and evidence to the contrary.

Hope is simultaneously humanity’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness, right? Isn’t that how the saying goes? Well, whoever thought the first part to be true never met Neci.

God.

I’m beginning to lose hope. If it just wasn’t for the goddamned Oankali and their goddamned trade, we’d be rebuilding instead of relying on hope and living on pipe dreams. They keep insisting that our “contradiction” will inevitably lead to our demise. They think they’re doing us a favor. Keeping us alive. But what is life if it means I have to lose the most important part of me, if I give up everything I’ve known to be true, if I’m no longer human? Life would be meaningless.

If we destroy ourselves again, so be it. Death is preferable to a life without meaning.