Hopefully Everyone

“What’s your choice, Marcus?”

What’s the choice, indeed.

Marcus Smart had known many of the Ents for a long time, but he had never thought they would come to him when it came to making a decision. They tended to take matters of the planet into their own hands. Death and life were part of the same cycle to them. One would feed into the other like water tumbling over rocks, until the end of time.

Smart thought the end of time was pretty overrated, but there were a few centuries in there that were pretty nice.

“I don’t think you should do it.”

Smart would have to be careful. The Ents respected him for what he had done for them in combat, but he would need to give them a reason in order for them to trust in his judgement.

“Why?”

The head Ent, Jonathan, was very tall even by Ent standards. His parents had named him after the human revolutionary Jonathan Cribbs, who had a big hand in the collapse of the Mid Atlantic States of America in the Civil War of 2138. It was some real nerd shit, in Jonathan’s opinion.

“I just think it’s worth it to see if humanity can pull it together,” Smart tapped his fingers on the table, waiting to see if they would press him further on the point. The confused look on several of their faces tipped the question that came several seconds later.

“With what you told us, isn’t ending humanity the way to stop the coming calamity?”

“That’s a short sighted way of looking at it,” Smart stood up, ready to talk them through the conclusion he already knew they would agree to, “There’s a lot of problems out there, no matter how big you have to find a way through them together. Writing someone out of what’s to come, that’s how you seize something. Not how you build something.”

“What about the critical inconsistency you warned us about?”

“Oh sorry, I forgot to update you this cycle. That’s fine, the critical inconsistency is a guy named Kyrie Irving. That happened thousands of years ago,” Smart leaned back and sighed.

“So we are stuck in the bad time cycle then. Where you couldn’t stop him from throwing the pass.”

Smart sat up and smiled, “There’s no such thing as a bad time cycle. It’s just the inflection point of reality, a single moment all possible reality converge and break apart from. One NBA game in Cleveland.”

Smart had said this part quite a few times, but he always liked it, no matter how many times he lived through it. It was like karaoke when a big chorus line really hits.

“All of them end up the same, all those roads lead to the same place at the end, and they all end up equal. Bad stuff sometimes, great stuff other times, everything ebbs and flows. Not everyone gets to see the good stuff, and not everyone gets to see the bad stuff.”

Smart took his place again at the head of the council table.

“The important part is that you make it as nice as you can for the people you care about.”

A young Ent spoke up loudly and abruptly, drawing angry stares from some of the elders.

“And who is it that we should care about?”

Smart looked out the window at the blasted trash wastes in the distance beyond the Ent’s newly cultivated forests.

“Hopefully everyone”