I don't want to get peoples' hopes up too high. This is a crazy longshot. It's also requiring every bit of the writing skillset I've spent 62 years acquiring, baking my brain, and probably doing the same for Rae, Quinch, and Ammon too. But like you, I can't just sit here and NOT try it.
Longshot might be underselling it. Crazy, even moreso. Everything we have done so far has been a longshot, from the rally to the emails and capes and cowls and roping the media, given what we're up against, a multicontinental monstrosity of a megacorporation that hasn't treated us with more acknowledgement than one would give to ants in a picnic. The fact that we've been -
are, in fact - trying to overcome something of this scale, and not destructively, but
constructively... I don't think I've, until now, thought to step back and admire the sheer audacity of what's being prepared.
I'm reminded of a scene in Chrono Trigger. I don't know how many of you played it, or even remember it. It's, by no stretch of imagination an iconic moment, but it's one that's always stuck in my memory. The characters are told that the way ahead, the only way out, the only way of merely not being slowly but surely stomped out of existence is a path that nobody has ever returned alive from.
"Gotta try, right?"
And at that point, everything crystallises. I could never see those three words being spoken with any spark of home. I couldn't even hear them with determination. All I could see is grim, desperate realism, because all around them, the world is dying. Humanity as a whole slowly being extinguished, without escape, without
hope, and the only other thing left to do is to push forward - forward into something that has never been accomplished before, something that may very well be impossible to accomplish no matter what - and realizing that the only choices left to take are to struggle, and risk and toil for the sake of a hopelessly improbable victory, or lay down and accept the easy certainty of defeat.
I, honestly, don't expect us to win this. I don't know how many of us really do. But I am willing to struggle, and risk and toil to prove myself wrong, because when time runs out and hope vanishes and determination loses all direction, I'll be able to look back and know that I didn't accept the easy certainty of defeat. I'll know that for years and decades to come, there will be one less "if only" to torment myself with whenever I look back on this game and think how differently things might have gone. And so, here we are, trying to harness forces that are, when you step back and look at it, quite literally beyond our understanding because, well...
Gotta try, right?