UTOPIA

You are alone alone alone and all that is left is the hunger you live in. Blood and bile and an open throat. (Utopia,"The Rapture of Nothing")

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Utopia is a word that means perfection.

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Security Officer Second Class Quinlan Jeremy Partridge liked tidiness. He liked smooth, uncluttered surfaces, the sting of antiseptic, the gleam of polished metal. He liked straight edges and sharp creases. He liked to be able to see a long way. For all these reasons, he liked space, the nice, solid black between stars, the vast emptiness like a desk cleaned off at the end of a shift. And he liked the cruiser Magellan, shiny and upright with its imposing towers and right angles that were deliberately non-aerodynamic because the city-ship was never going to land on a messy, dirt-covered, verminous planet or have to worry about wind-sheer. No resistance in space.

And for all these reasons, he felt itchy when he looked at the trash on the table, thrashing around in the grip of some kind of convulsion--if a convulsion were a terrier and the man were a chew toy--medics alternately trying to hold him down and leaping out of the way of his flailing arms. It wasn't possible that, through two layers of security glass, Quinlan Jeremy Partridge could actually smell the sweat on the man's battered body, or the blood that was exploding in viscous gouts from his mouth as he shouted, but the voice, the shrapnel of raspy, disjointed obscenity, was its own kind of pollution. The only saving grace was that most of what the man shouted was unintelligible. Wrinkling his nose, Partridge turned away and tugged at the wristband of first one dove grey glove and then the other. There was no use subjecting himself to this anymore. That man--he checked the dataflexi--Jayne Cobb, wasn't going to be good for much for a long time, if at all.

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Mal said when we "rescued" that survivor on the colony ship that time that the only way to deal with watchin' what the Reavers done was to become one. And that poor sono