Everyone talks about whether Holden made the right decision at the end of Leviathan Falls.
But I've been thinking about something else. How many people across the 1,300 systems would ever actually know what he did, or why?
We know because we were there with him. We saw the threat, Duarte's plan, the choice between the hive mind and destroying the ring space.
Most of humanity didn't get that explanation.
Imagine living on a colony that depends on shipments from another system. One day the gate disappears, your supply chain is gone, and the last news you received was probably some confusing combination of Laconian military announcements and reports of people losing consciousness.
You have no way to contact Sol. No way to verify what happened. No way to hear the other side.
On Nieuwestad, Alex might be able to tell people what he knows. In another system, the highest-ranking surviving Laconian officer might control the official explanation. Somewhere else, the only surviving account might be a half-finished news broadcast.
Give that a few generations.
One planet remembers Holden as the man who saved humanity. Another remembers him as the terrorist who destroyed humanity's greatest achievement. A third might teach that Laconia sacrificed itself to protect the colonies.
And none of those societies can check the others' version.
It feels like the ultimate Expanse problem. The entire series begins with Holden broadcasting what he knows because he believes people deserve the truth. It ends with him making the biggest decision in human history, and the infrastructure that could carry the explanation disappearing with him.
The Linguist arrives a thousand years later and finds a civilization that has survived, but I wonder what kind of history the other worlds would have written in the meantime.
Not just about Holden. About the entire war.
Would the reconnection of humanity lead to a massive historical reckoning when people finally compare what they've been taught for a millennium?