The Fate of Mice by Susan Palwick Page A

though I understand why she didn’t. I know she thought about him, more and more towards the end. Her last words were about him. “Nate,” she said, her voice a thready whisper, “take care of your father. I keep hoping that someday he’ll be happy before he dies.”
    I couldn’t see through my tears. “I will, Mom. Have you been happy, Mom? I love you, Mom.” But she didn’t answer; she couldn’t. She took a last breath and died.
    At the funeral, the minister said a bunch of stuff about how she was in a better world now, how we were all going to a better world. My father couldn’t take it: he got up and left in the middle of the service. But it turns out that Mom missed the better world and that Dad got to see it, because it arrived two years later, on March 24, 2029.
F ROM THE T RUTH T ERRORIST M ANIFESTO
    It took a while after the Change for everyone to figure out what was going on, and then we weren’t able to fix everything. A lot of the damage was irreversible: the global warming that’s wiped out huge portions of coastline on every continent, the HIV that decimated Africa even when all the pharmaceutical companies distributed drug cocktails for free, the species extinctions, beautiful animals no one will ever see again. So it’s not like the Change made us all happy, because it sent a lot of people, the ones who’d never wanted to face those issues before, into tremendous pain and grief. They could no longer hide from what they’d done, from what we’d all done, and how it made them feel. A lot of people spent a lot of time in agony, because we’d done so much harm we couldn’t undo. The suicide rate went way up for a while, before it disappeared almost completely.
    The Change made all of us see everything more clearly: the way all of you always had. You are our spiritual forbears. You were the original Truth Terrorists, the ones who burned through all deceptions. That’s why we’re trying to free you now from the lie in which you’ve been imprisoned.
    We couldn’t fix everything. Things aren’t perfect now. All any of us could do was promise to be better, to share and cooperate and be compassionate, to try our very best not to break things the way they’d been broken before. We kept that promise. We don’t need police now, and poverty and hunger have been almost wiped out, along with suicide, and there aren’t any more wars. But we still grieve for all those animals, and for all the people who died who didn’t have to.
    It took us a while to believe that the Change was real, even though the difference was so dramatic everywhere. When the papers are suddenly full of stories about incredible acts of philanthropy and ceasefires and cooperation between people and political parties who were previously at each other’s throats, and when that’s happening all over the world, and when it’s all in the service of helping people who need help: well, let’s just say that we all knew right away that something staggering was going on. There are still people who obsess about exactly how it happened, probably because they’re afraid that if things changed so quickly, they could change back that quickly, too. Nobody really knows what the mechanism was; the spontaneous evolutionary leap theory is the one most of us have settled on, but religious people ascribe the Change to grace or miracle, to God rather than science, and there are people who think it was interference by kindly aliens, or even some side effect of a benevolent virus released into the atmosphere by saintly scientists. There are still plenty of conspiracy theorists around, but now they come up with stories about elaborate networks of justice and mercy and goodwill. And that just makes everyone else laugh. We
know
the people around us are plotting to perform acts of lovingkindness. That’s been going on for twenty years now. It’s not news. It’s not anything anyone needs to keep a secret.
    Except that some people
have
been keeping it a