Archangel_117

Firearm discharges

If you ran into someone that had never read your books, and didn't know your character at all, which book would you suggest to them first? Killing floor as the first in published order, or Second Son as the first chronologically?

It was to give a reason why the pilot would have disobeyed a direct order and fired the missile at the end of the episode. With no backstory, we would be watching some random Air Force operator decide arbitrarily to fire on this guy when it's convenient for the story and the characters we are following. In order to give a plausible reason why he would have done something so drastic as firing an unauthorized missile in another country, we needed to have some set up for the character.

This guy spends his shifts hitting a button to delete someone thousands of miles away that he's never met, just because his superiors give him an okay based on intel they have. In direct combat, even if you disagree with the principles behind the conflict, it's much easier to convince yourself of the legitimacy of your immediate situation because the other guy is actively threatening your life and the lives of your comrades in some way. But this operator is sitting at a control station in Nevada, just erasing people at the behest of someone else, and nothing more. He feels immense guilt over what he is and heavily questions the legitimacy of the lives he takes.

The Vegas sequence was him trying to find some way to symbolically get rid of the guilt of all the lives he's taken, represented by the numbered bills. He can't. He wins every bet, and the money stays with him, much to his visual dismay. He even puts it all on a single number and hits the ~3% chance. He gets used by the man and his wife for their sexual gratification. He has a moment of pleasure, followed by the realization of his being nothing more than a tool, an instrument for someone else's needs. He can't even convince the guy to take any money for his wife's services. The guy only looks at him and says, "You earned it." The money represents the lives he's taken and the universe is telling him he earned them all. He feels like shit.

Then one shift he sees an opportunity. There is a man dragging a woman outside a village to rape her. They are away from other people so the risk of collateral damage is minimal. She struggles free and moves to a relatively safe distance. He sees this guy, a man who, unlike his other targets, he can acutely see the crimes of. He directly sees the evil this man is committing, and his capacity to stop it right here and right now, and save this woman. He doesn't get the okay from his superiors to fire the shot. For once the ultimate choice lies with him. After 107 questionably justifiable kills that have haunted him, and that he is apparently cursed to never be rid of, he has the ultimate power to make a kill that counts; a kill that is justified; a kill he can live with. He fires the missile knowing he's doing something actually good for once, instead of just erasing another nobody he knows nothing about.

But the only way it will change is if people start voting differently. It wouldn't be an overnight change, and it would take multiple elections going through the process of splitting the vote like this to provide enough of a trend of traction among Independent candidates for it to have a chance of being successful in the future.

We are where we are with party-identity-politics because Independent's can't get traction, and they can't get traction because no one votes for them, and no one votes for them because they hardly win, and they hardly win because they can't get traction. The only way out of the cycle is to spend some elections voting for the candidate you know likely won't stand a chance for the sole purpose of getting the trend going.

Planting trees, shade, and generations and all that.