Still, she shrieks when a shimmering box with too many right angles coalesces in her room. She kicks away, pressing her back against the bed to get away from it. The bubble is much smaller than her; she imagines how it will feel to be sucked into it and smashed down to a singularity, only to be dropped in the Sahara or somewhere equally inhospitable.

  The door crashes open, her father’s hand on the jamb. He sees: the bubble, the lipstick, her—in that order. The smell of beer rolls in behind him, the thunder that follows the lightning. His mouth opens to shape the words what the fuck but she screams first, get out of my room and his face purples. He steps toward her, raising the back of his hand, the echo of her mother’s old favorite posture and she stares her betrayal into him. Dares him to do it again, to not really mean it one more time. In the last moment before contact, instinct overrides intent and she cringes.

  His hand never strikes her. She’s still never seen a bubbling, but there doesn’t seem to be a singularity involved: the bubble in her room is as tall as her, now, taller, and it floats right in front of her. She wails and kicks at it, but there is no purchase to be found on its slick, too-perfect surface, it feels like trying to grab a cartoon. Give him back, she demands, give him back, give him back, how is this better?

  The bubble pushes past her out the door, an uninvited guest on an overstayed welcome. Before the apartment door swings open in front of it, it disgorges a much smaller fragment of itself, which flies back toward her and she screams again—no, you can keep him, no!—rejecting this would-be reunion.

  But the miniature bubble doesn’t swarm up to her size. Instead, it tracks back and forth in front of her twice. Then it swoops down and collects the four lipsticks that she’s just added to her collection, leaving the Purple Predator standing upright on the rug. When it zips away, she shouts wordlessly after it. She has nothing left to say, and no one to hear it.

  Better is not a state that the Earth reaches on its own, not even one that it reaches for. Better is a weight that settles over the planet: comforting, perhaps, to some who feel its touch, but driving the air inexorably out of what resistance remains.

  Speed through a few years’ worth of the planet’s turns: the soft green paintbrush that touches up the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa and the American Midwest, the crisp white that coalesces at the poles, the variegated browns of rich, well-loved soil.

  Cities spiral upward as well as out, building steel-girder arms to cradle all the people that come to them. Streets and sidewalks and skyscrapers grow into homes for the needs and wishes of those that live there, rather than cramming human lives into ill-fitted spaces and demanding that they fit. Architecture takes a turn toward the organic: a conscious rejection of inorganic Architect lines and angles, but also an acceptance of the softness and fragility of Earth-based life.

  Upon its completion, the jump gate becomes a permanent constellation in the Earth’s skies. It heels meekly alongside the Earth at the L2 Lagrange point. From a grounded vantage, the ships that it swallows up or disgorges are invisible, their scale negligible against a gate network whose scale rivals the Moon’s. But arrivals and departures are heralded in different ways at the anchor stations for the two space elevators that reach skyward. Scientists and artists leave the Earth with questions and return with small pieces of captured beauty. Extraterrestrial ambassadors, from other parts of the Architects’ apparently vast network, visit to exchange songs, poetry, olfactory sensoria, sculpture, sex.

  Nonviolence and equity are a relentlessly enforced routine, and routines, practiced long enough, grind their way into habit. No one can forget what things were like, before, but children are born every day for whom both despair and luxury will be fairy tales from a different and darker age. The great forgetting, when it comes, will be untidy and piecemeal; still, it will come.

  But paradise, though equally distributed, is imperfect on the uptake. Some habits were carved deep into the bone long before the Architects arrived.

  One of these is rebellion. Leah, on the cusp of graduating from Elder Crèche, dreams of disappearing into deep space through the jump gate. But in waking life she grounds herself, hard, into the planet of her birth. This is the planet that pushed forth her family (such as it is), this is the place that belongs to her in a way nothing else can. Or maybe she belongs to it—notions of possession will always be muddled, for her, the Architects’ edits overlaid incoherently over the way of life she was born into. She ghosts through well-lit city streets, looking for others on the move. There are no curfews at her age, as Crèche slowly pares back the safety rails of childhood. She has the freedom, at least, to prowl.

  And to seek out others like her. There can be no organizing efforts toward vandalism, or theft, or tram-slamming, where a group of like-minded kids swarm a tram car and block anyone else from boarding. Architect eyes are everywhere. These petty throes of antagonism must arise organically, as human a design as any sweeping new building, an emergent property of human beings acting in sudden, shocking concert. Both more than their component parts, and less.

  There are two kids, a little younger than Leah, slouching in front of the Lower Crèche they’re years too old for. Someone else, lanky with new-grown adulthood, paces idle circles around the fountain in the greenway. They catch each other’s eyes, flicking a glance at the big window of a community dining hall. It’s empty, at this time of night, containing nothing but the reflection of the street doubled in the dark glass.

  As one, they swing toward the garbage can sitting on the curb—all four of them lunging forward in concert, no longer individuals. Murmurations, news sites call groups of this sort, and there is something of the impossible grace of a flock of birds in synchronous flight to this, a certain balletic violence. The garbage can goes through the window, glass shatters, they duck inside to upend tables and throw open refrigerators, and for now, for these few glorious, splintered seconds, this is theirs and only theirs, their city and their planet and their destruction. Leah fumbles in her pockets to engrave on the wall in purple lipstick: F-U-C—

  When the bubble breaks over her, erasing the unfinished word in a haze of crystalline static, she laughs. She keeps laughing as she grinds the purple lipstick beneath her heel, rubbing it into the bubble, keeps laughing all during the impossibly fast transit. She stops laughing only when the bubble evaporates and deposits her, in a shower of dried lipstick confetti, into the place of her exile: her own room at the Crèche.

  When she staggers to the door, it’s not even locked.

  Her only punishment is the total lack of punishment. Consequences, yes, of course there are consequences. Her father refuses a Crèche-offered visit, but there are video calls with her dead-eyed, starched-smile mother, who talks about her new job as a jump gate technician and all the opportunities available for a bright young person in the Architect Era. She doesn’t offer to see Leah in person, and Leah doesn’t ask. And there are counseling sessions, with a human psychologist—who tediously answers her questions with his own—and with an Architect liaison—who answers her with infuriating detail.

  What does she have to break to make the Architects angry? The Architects don’t experience anger in the ways that human beings do. They’re not mad, they’re disappointed, basically. If they’re so powerful, why do they let her ruin everything she can get her hands on? Garbage cans and glass windows don’t have feelings; sentient beings are what matter. Then why doesn’t she feel like she matters? Because she has taken the Architects’ arrival as the total divorce of her ownership in a place, a planet, a future. And so they let her rebel now in order to let her feel as if she has some control—some claim against her own life.

  You know it didn’t fucking work, right?

  The process remains incomplete. Looking at an Architect is like falling through space. She can see herself a hundred times over in the broken-glass bend of its joints, its teeth, its eyes. Maybe it always will. That will never mean you weren’t worth the effort.

  So why don’t you hold me accountable for anything?

  Accountable? The Architect shifts, shattering a hundred of her reflected faces. We can punish you. We can limit your access to other people that you could hurt. But we can’t hold you accountable. That is yours to do—or not to.

  And it is hers, isn’t it, and was all along: a gnarled ball of emotions that bursts out of her in a sob. It is shame and it is rage and it is exhaustion, it is mourning for what she’ll never have and for the choices she’ll still need to make. But it is hers. An ugly little thing, but true things are often ugly; and not so small that she cannot feel its presence. And in choosing it, she leaves behind the rest—the things for which this planet was called to judgment in the first place, all the original sin of the Earth. It isn’t hers to bear and it never was.

  I’m sorry, she says, and the words used to mean so little, as threadbare as they were from the many times her parents each patched them over for new use. But she’s surprised to find that she mostly means it.

  We know.

  So what the hell am I supposed to do now? she asks, and that is the only question the Architect refuses to answer.

  Imagine a better world.

  Not a perfect one, because that world could never feel real, not the kind of world you could live in. Imagine a world where a hamburger is a once-a-month treat, but where someone like Leah could walk into any grocery depository or restaurant and walk out again with a full stomach, whenever she wants. Imagine a world where she must wait five years, after Crèche, to get into the education track she wants, but where she can learn the languages spoken on other worlds, hear their stories, speculate about societies even stranger than her own. Imagine a world where you could fuck up, again and again, but still be allowed to try, and never be expected to lie that this time, this time, you’ll do things perfectly and make all the right choices. Imagine a world where the stars could still be yours, if you really wanted them, with all the joy and all the responsibility that comes along.

  Imagine that world. Hold it close and love it as much as you can bear. Because that world is not this one, and there is no map detailed enough to show us the way between.

  The final judgment comes not from the Architects, but from the hands of humankind. It issues thus: if we can’t have a world without you, then we choose to have none at all.

  Pieced together afterward, the story goes like this: a murmuration of jump gate technicians managed to override the gate’s safety protocols and reprogram an automated navigational course before the gate station could be locked down. In that one minute and twenty-seven seconds, an Architect ship came through the gate without decelerating and arrived not in orbit but in the Pacific Ocean.

  The steam cloud is immense, the tremors felt for thousands of kilometers. Afterward, Leah and most of her cohort stay glued to the screen in the Xenosociology study nook, holding hands, watching for updates. Was her mother one of the jump gate techs involved? She’ll never know, but that borrowed guilt burrows in her stomach. While the others talk, in low voices, she goes outside the nook to throw up in the trash bin.

  The Architects and their liaisons make routine appearances, keeping the Earth apprised of what is happening—a crashed ship, imminent storms, evacuations. They don’t, however, say much about what that means. Which says quite a lot on its own.

  Ships arrive suddenly, practically a murmuration of their own, albeit a far-flung one. They emerge from the clouds to hang, waiting, in the air over cities and plains and seas. Not all of them are of Architect design: Leah recognizes Awa aesthetics in the blurry lines on her screen, and other ships that look like they could have been built by the Gardeners, or the Creakers, or the Ieoueai. Go home. Take only what you need most, the on-screen liaison tells them. Though he’s human, his expression is as broken-glass as any Architect’s, and his tears collect the light from his camera. It’s time to go.

  Leah runs home, amid a storm of bubbles that break into being around her. Not yet: she dodges each bubble even as other people fling themselves into them, panting and sobbing, clutching children and cats and guitars and books. In her apartment, she shoves medications and a handful of tampons and a small stuffed mouse into her purse. It’ll have to be good enough. Or if it’s not good, it’ll have to be enough. Before she ducks out again, she yanks open the drawer in the bathroom and pulls out a fistful of lipsticks, orange and blue and scarlet and pink, which collide complainingly with the mess of pill bottles.

  In the street, a bubble bursts open beside her. She sidesteps, and it is quickly claimed by a woman and two little girls; it swirls around them and shoots upward, toward the waiting ships. Another pops right beside Leah, but she shakes her head. Not yet. Not yet. One more look. One more breath of heavy gray sky and green growing things and glass. There is no place exactly like this one anywhere out there. And this place, of course, has never truly been hers either; it has only ever belonged to the people willing to destroy it to keep it. Nor will the stars be for her: those are the Architects’, if they are anyone’s; even if they might loan them out, for a while, a time-share room with a view.

  Against her thigh, the purse bounces, and the lipsticks clatter, reassuringly real. They’re hers, in a way nothing else has ever really been, a way nothing else will be again. She puts her hand over them, holding them close against her. Such a small thing, such a small guilt. She tears it away from the greater one: the kind of guilt that would break something beautiful just to deny it to another. The kind of guilt that would choose damnation over reincarnation. The kind that would willingly stay behind to bear the unthinkable consequences of an unthinkable crime.

  I’m ready, she says. The bubble’s cold embrace snaps around her and bears her skyward. I’m ready, she repeats, I’m ready, and that is hers too.

  About the Author

  Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf living in the Netherlands. Her debut novella Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was a Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Analog, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her third novella, Emergent Properties, arrives in Summer 2023. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction.

  Calf Cleaving in the Benthic Black

  Isabel J. Kim

  The technical term is “generation ship cascade failure.” Cryogenic collapse. Millennium drive breakdown. Failed ship-in-a-bottle revolution against the corpostate hegemony. I call all the outcomes whalefalls, though. Because that’s what they are: the carcasses of something that used to be alive, floating slowly down through the black.

  I guess that makes me one of those blind fish that flit around in the dark. Those pale monstrous things with teeth like needles. Me in my nullsuit, carrying my ripper as I clank around on the outside of the hull. This is one of the smaller generation ships we’ve tapped. The size of a station, maybe. I wonder how big whales are.

  I’ve never seen a whale before. I’ve seen pictures, though. Some of them from data caches in the whalefalls I’ve breached. The guys who fund generation ship programs are always real concerned with preserving history. All those ancient animals from the homeland. I never got the point of it. By generation three a narwhale is basically a unicorn, right? Just a picture on a screen.

  Seam calls me a callous fuck. She says that history’s important. I just think the whole thing is impractical. We need raw material out here, not linguistic datasets and pictures of oceans that are so far away as to not exist. But what can I say, I’m nine generations removed from the homeland—that’s Europa for me, where the first shipyards were constructed. I’ve got blue-collar nobody in my bones. Guess that’s why I’m out here.

  “Think I found a better breach point,” Seam says over the radio. “Starboard, midship. Scans indicate general higher ambient temperatures. Might have some live systems and databanks. Maybe a nerve center?”

  I raise my ripper inches from the hull. Seam wouldn’t be telling me this after drop unless the new breach point was particularly interesting. Most puncture sites are usually identical, so “better” was probably an understatement. I don’t like losing the time, but I trust Seam.

  “Copy that, pick me up for rendezvous?”

  “Walk, bitch,” Seam says, followed by a staticky laugh.

  “I’ll see you in two weeks, then.”

  I holster my ripper and wait. Soon the blue needle-nose of our ship is looming over the side of the hull, and I smile even though Seam can’t see me.

  Seam and I go way back. Same crèche on Saint-Seb Station, before the whole place got scrapped for parts and everyone still on board was liquidated. We were lucky. We got out a couple of days before the corpo-mandated deconstruction began, the proud owners of our janky little shitbox and a jump drive, fifty million credits in debt. For the jump drive, I mean. Not the shitbox. The shitbox was stolen from Saint-Seb, but there’s no one around to call us out on it anymore.

  The shitbox veers low. Seam opens the airlock and throws down a line. I tether myself, cutting the magnetization to my boots. Seam pulls me up. I close the airlock to the hiss of sweet oxygen. Mostly nitrogen, actually. We’re running a little low on the ox, we have to top up somewhere soon. We were supposed to be back at Weaver Station by now, but we got the call that this generation ship had been spotted, and that it looked to be unbreached. We were lucky enough to be the closest in the sector.

  An uncracked defunct generation ship floats through once every thirty years, maybe, loaded with enough supplies to sustain a colony for years. In the next twenty-four hours, this thing is going to be swarmed by every single other pale blind fish in the area, ready to start tearing chunks of flesh. It’ll be bloody before it gets boring. First all the small, rare, expensive stuff gets scraped, then the months of hauling supplies, and finally the decades of carving the ship up into its component parts, all of us in our little shitboxes darting like mayflies.

 

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