“Have I ever told you that I hate this time of year?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Rue swings her feet, kicking at the air; a tiny dinosaur and a harried zombie meander along the street three stories below. “You do?”
Arlene hums in reply, and glares at a giggling mass of sexy fruits. A bare-chested nurse runs after them, abs glistening in the fading light. “It’s just so surface.”
Her hands are always the same, soft and firm as old well-worn leather and covered with fine traceries of scars. Some of the scars you recognize—the finger she almost lost slicing onions when she laughed too hard at one of your jokes, the scattered dots where bees objected to her plucking a chunk of honeycomb, the shiny burn-scars on her fingertips that she’d had to beg your help with. Most of them you do not. She was already ancient when you first met.
The surgeon is sprawled out on her living room couch when you arrive, flipping through screen after screen of beautiful people on her ancient phone. One of her housemates answered the door and let you inside, their too-perfect smile drying into a polished mask as they realized why you were there. The last words they said to you before they fled were a quiet “good luck.”
She’s really not much to look at. Chubby and long-limbed, with oily shoulder-length hair. You can see her split ends from the doorway; it’s obvious that she’s never bothered to put proper care into them. Her clothes show a similar lack of effort, just loose grey sweatpants and a tank-top that barely contains her breasts.
“The strangest thing,” Carol will say, afterwards, “was that I knew it was right. It was—have you ever seen someone do something, and known it was wrong, without even having to think about it?”
“Of course,” the interrogator will say, “like a wild animal mauling someone.”
“Exactly! But,” she’ll reply, “no, you don’t get it. It—it looked like that, sure. But it was right to do it. It was doing what was best for both of us, for everyone.”
“What is true power” is supposed to be one of those deep, philosophical questions with no real answer. It—and the thought experiments which grow on it like clinging weeds—are meant to become a mirror to the speaker’s biases, to reveal how they think about the world. Let that be so.
To my mind, the answer is simple: true power is control of the context in which the world is understood. It is the ability to say “this is what the world is”, and be heard.