It wasn’t snowing. It was July in New York. Yet as Christina looked up at the shredded paper and glittering Mylar, and she heard the physical wave of applause coming on either side of their electric vehicle, she felt a warm welcome home.

A million people were watching her from the street and crammed in the glass towers that turned Lower Manhattan into a canyon. After six months in orbit around the planet’s singular moon, the onslaught of loud noise felt overwhelming. Still, she was Commander Koch. She was the first woman to step on the lunar surface. She had to give them a performance.

Joslin sat next to her and waved energetically at the crowd with both of her hands. She was drinking in all their praise.

“I can’t believe so many people are here,” Joslin shouted over the din. “They get it.”

She pushed a stray brown hair from away from her eyes and instinctively twitched her fingers near the bridge of her nose. It was a habit she picked up in college, to push her glasses up, but that habit remained even after her orbital corrective surgery two years ago.

“They get to spend a few hours not working,” Major Knoll retorted with cynicism to Joslin’s wonder. “Hot dog vendors are handing out free food. It’s a party, but don’t mistake that for the world changing.”

Maddison listened and clutched the vehicle’s seats carefully. She looked out at the crowd, the rooftops, and the security standing around. She was a pilot and an engineer and these situational instincts had made her successful even though she didn’t know how to turn them off.

Christina’s own gaze was fixed on the thousands of flags being waved in the wind. Stars and stripes were everywhere, from people’s hands to the edge of windows. From 238,000 miles away, there hadn’t been anything close to this. There was only one flag on the moon and it was dusty. They had to go out of their way on a high-profile mission to brush off the dirt and take photos.

There weren’t borders on the moon, or walls, or a canyon full of people. There was just the glowing blue marble with a beauty that she could not describe. They had taken photos. In fact it seemed like every magazine in every newsstand had one of her photos on the cover. For Christina, this Overview Effect had fractured her life, creating a permanent shift in her whole identity. She clasped her hands together, trying to stay calm amidst the excitement.

The vehicle slowed down as it came to a small, temporary stage that had been erected near City Hall. The Mayor stepped forward with his signature grin and finely trimmed beard on his face. In his hands was a comically oversized key. The roar of the crowd had only grown louder.

“Commander Koch, Dr. Spencer, Major Knoll,” the Mayor began, his voice carried by a nano-microphone wirelessly connected to speakers down the street. “I want to congratulate your return on behalf of the eight million New Yorkers who have been watching your lunar journey with great enthusiasm. And on behalf of a proud, united nation...”

Christina stopped paying attention after he said united. The word felt hollow to her. She looked out at the faces pressed against the barricades. They seemed joyful, proud, and maybe something more intense, more feral.

And then she saw as one man hopped over. He looked to be in his late forties, with a pale face that seemed to lack sunlight. His eyes locked with her and she saw not joy but an existential terror.

“You’re not them! You’re not! We know what you really are!” he screeched, his unamplified voice cutting off the mayor.

Maddison had already shifted and reached for Joslin. Christina’s own training took over too. She saw the gun; a simple, semi-automatic pistol. It looked like a cheap toy, but one that was simultaneously a threat.

Christina flinched as she heard the *crack* of the shot echo. The crowd’s cheers suddenly transformed into screams.

She looked up and saw a small, dark hole appear in the thick bulletproof glass panel directly behind her head. The sunlight filtering through it made the new crystal fractures look like a diamond.

The mayor’s oversized key clattered down on the stage.

The barricades had fallen to the ground and she saw people running towards her, away from her, and in every direction. NYPD officers were overwhelmed by the sudden chaos. She looked over at her friends and neither of them seemed to be harmed. Hurriedly she pulled Joslin down beneath the back seats.

“Get us out of here!” she yelled at the driver.

“We can’t get anywhere,” the driver opened the door and got out. “There are too many people on the road. Come on.”

Suddenly three Secret Service agents appeared around them, manifesting out of seemingly nowhere. They grabbed her harshly and dragged her out. Joslin was pulled out next.

“We need to get out of here,” Maddison said, taking control of the situation.

An agent blocked her view as she was briskly led away from the car. The lingering confetti on her skin now felt like sandpaper. Although she could no longer see them, she could still hear their terrified footsteps. The shooter had faded into the crowd, swallowed up by the chaos he created.

The hotel suite had an uncomfortable silence. The space was pressurized, creating a sealed isolation from the world for the VIPs who had enough wealth to afford this level of security. They were now fifty stories up in a hotel with panoramic views of a city that, an hour ago, had tried to kill them.

Confetti still clung to Christina’s royal blue NASA flight suit. She was staring at her own petrified reflection in the window’s glass. She was supposed to be a hero, Commander Koch, but now she had a small red paper stuck in her dark hair like it was colorful ash. She felt like a fraud.

Joslin was curled up on the white sofa with her knees drawn to her chest, shivering despite the room’s sophisticated temperature control. She couldn’t turn her face away from the massive flatscreen TV on the wall playing the same gruesome attack with occasional breaks for pundits to get in their two cents. Given the number of people who were there, the broadcasters could play an endless selection of angles of people screaming and being trampled. The pundits were busy weaving new realities in real-time. “Was it a foreign power?... A lone wolf?.... The mayor’s security crisis...”

“Turn it off. It’s just noise and empty speculation,” Maddison said flatly. She was staring in front of the mirror, carefully picking confetti off her suit one by one. Each colorful scrap was placed into an empty water glass like dead butterflies.

“They’re saying his gun jammed after the first shot,” Joslin said, her voice tinny and weak. “It was a cheap 3D-printed ghost gun. After firing it, the casing cracked. If he had tried a second time it would’ve exploded in his hand.”

“Well, I’m glad we’re alive because of shoddy engineering,” Maddison spat out, finishing her cleanup and grabbing a nearby barstool to sit in. “That really restores my faith in humanity.”

Suddenly a sharp knock caused all three of them to jump nervously. Christina turned from the window.

“Come in,” she said.

A middle-aged woman entered in a crisp navy-blue suit. The short tie around her neck was a perfect match. Her hair was brown, but turning silver.

“My name is Special Agent Quesada, with the FBI.”

She paused and pulled a badge out of her pocket. Christina stared at it closely before giving back an accepting nod.

“We have the shooter in custody. His name is Walter Higgins, a 48-year old man from Staten Island. He is a machinist.”

“Was he alone?” Christina asked coolly. This was a mission debrief. That was she had to tell herself.

“Sort of,” Quesada reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She unfolded it and tapped on the screen. “He wasn’t following a foreign state, or was part of a terror cell. He was part of a web of conspiracy theories though.”

“So he wasn’t a lone wolf?”

“We don’t anticipate any other risk to you,” she noted with an unconvincing reassurance. “Are you familiar with the conspiracists chatting about ‘Selene Replacement’?”

“That’s insane,” Maddison snorted. “That’s bottom-of-the-barrel garbage for trolls who live in their basements all day. Nobody actually believes in that.”

“They do,” Quesada acknowledged solemnly. “They believe it as much as people used to believe in vengeful gods. This is their religious truth.”

“Wait, what is this conspiracy?” Christina wondered.

Quesada turned her screen to see a bunch of small boxes of text all connected with white lines in what seemed to be some sort of digital corkboard.

“The Selene Replacement has been passed around in some online forums. We’ve been monitoring them. Their core belief is that the original Artemis 3 crew, you all, never actually returned. They have various explanations. Either you were killed, or captured, or somehow got stuck up there. In your place... well they have even more explanations for that.”

“So the government is full of lizard people?”

“Or clones. Or synthetics. They can be quite creative.”

“A shadowy cabal is installing us as part of a global takeover,” Maddison finished.

Christina stared at the screen with a deepening frown. “That man was trying to murder us because he thought we were space people?”

“That’s the simple way of putting it,” Quesada swiped across the screen from one edge to the other to display a new image of Christina standing on the moon holding a new sensor array. One of their missions was to install this and allow it to broadcast surface data back to Houston.

Yet this photo had been marked up. Her face, covered in a helmet, had been circled in red. There was a lens flare near her helmet, as the bright sun was not filtered through the Earth atmosphere. There was a caption underneath.

PROOF OF NON-HUMAN: THE ENTITY CANNOT HIDE ITS ENERGY SIGNATURE

“That’s just a camera artifact,” Christina whispered, struggling to comprehend their arguments. “Joslin hadn’t calibrated the camera properly yet. That was the second day. We were still learning...”

“I thought... I thought it would be like a phone,” Joslin stammered from the couch.

“But to people like Higgins, it was all the proof they needed,” Quesada countered. She swiped on the screen again and played a video of Maddison from a press conference.

“I remember that. It was before the launch.”

Maddison read the caption aloud: “Synthetic vocal processor lag. Note the delay as the entity accesses vocabulary database. The real Knoll would not hesitate.”

“Your father just had a stroke. You spent all night in the hospital. Who cares if you stumbled some technical jargon,” Christina sympathized.

“Son of a bitch,” Maddison breathed with fury.

“They don’t care about context,” Quesada replied dismissively. “They only care about how to fit into the narrative.”

Quesada walked slowly to Joslin, who was still shaking from shock. “They are thorough. They dig into everything.”

She swiped her finger once more.

“You should see this birth certificate,” Quesada passed the screen over to Joslin.

“That’s my daughter’s, Ava.”

“There is a discrepancy between the country record and hospital announcement in the time of birth.”

“It was a holiday. They were short-staffed,” Joslin murmured.

“Let me read the caption. ‘The imposter fabricated the backstory. This daughter is just a psychological anchor to make the clone seem human. She isn’t even real.’”

“Agent Quesada, is my family safe?” Joslin asked, her eyes now welling with tears.

“We have already assigned a full protection detail to your husband and daughter. Once we identified the shooter’s motive, we made sure they were safe,” Quesada reassured.

Joslin stared silently at the agent for a long time before nodding. She grabbed a pillow and buried her head in it.

Christina rubbed her temples. The global unity they had tried to inspire, the new perspective they had received of their planet, had all seemed futile. The three of them had seen a singular, beautiful world without borders. She was realizing that people were far harder to reach than with a personal testimony and reason.

Quesada hopped up from the couch and placed the phone, now folded, back into her pocket.

“The SWAT team didn’t meet any resistance at Higgins’ home. No firefight. He was just sitting on the porch with a lukewarm coffee.”

She paused, letting them picture that pathetic image.

“His house was covered in printouts from forums and crude charts. He seemed to blame your mission for everything, from stock market fluctuations to shipping delays. He had six monitors running in his living room, each one a live feed of social media channels celebrating what he did.”

“I can’t believe he’s proud of it,” Christina said with venom.

“He didn’t even succeed,” Maddison added.

“Maddison! He could’ve killed someone!” Christina admonished.

“He didn’t though,” Maddison shrugged.

“He thinks he is a hero,” Quesada confirmed. “He was calm during interrogation. He cooperated fully. He called his action a ‘diagnostic test’. If one of you had been shot, God forbid, and you either bled green, or dissolved into dust, or short-circuited, he would’ve taken that as proof he saved the world. He was quite disappointed when he realized you were all safe. He called it ‘an inconclusive data point’.”

Quesada’s disgust was clear in the way she quoted him.

“He was unrepentant.”

“What’s the next step then? You figure out who else is involved? Who’s funding it?”

“You might find this hard to grasp, but there isn’t anyone else. We’ve been searching his financial records and scanning his hard drives and there’s nobody else. Not really. He was laid off from a job in the Navy Yard a decade ago. Wife left him. He has barely ventured outside in the last year. He found an echo chamber online that give him a modicum of purpose and he radicalized himself.”

With a final look at the three, and a grim nod, Quesada opened the door and disappeared into the hallway. For a long time, the three of them didn’t speak. The television continued to play its cycle of violent imagery on mute.

“So...” Maddison broke the silence with a bitter laugh. “We just spent the last six months on another celestial body, surviving through math perfected by hundreds of brilliant people, trusting our lives to advanced technology, and we were nearly taken out by a lonely gun with a plastic gun? God, I need a drink.”

She walked over to the minibar, moving stiffly.

“I just can’t understand it,” Joslin trembled. “We went to another world. We brought back samples. We setup broadcast stations. You can see them through a telescope. Isn’t that supposed to mean something?”

“They look at the data, and the images, and they don’t see a miracle,” Christina remarked with disappointment.

“It’s a complete system failure of the human mind.”

Maddison grabbed a beer, a coffee stout, and cracked the can open with a loud hiss.

“You know, if a system failed on the Orion, we could diagnose it. We had all the schematics and tools. Or maybe we could eject it and replace it. There were processes and rules we could follow,” Maddison paused to take a long sip. “Oh that’s good and cold. How do you fix society? Where are their schematics?”

“They don’t exist,” Joslin’s voice cracked as tears fell down her face. “We were supposed to be the Overview Effect and talk about how we were all one people. He took that away from us. He stole our meaning. The overview doesn’t matter if nobody is willing to look up.”

Christina thought back to that moment that the engine cut-off as their lander stopped on the dusty surface. When the dust finally settled, she looked out through the viewport at Earth.

She didn’t see traffic, or drones firing missiles at each other, or petty arguments between neighbors. It was a bright jewel that seemed to glow blue against an infinite black void. White clouds swirled dynamically. She felt a connection in that moment not just to her colleagues, or her country, but to every person who was alive then and had even lived. Emotions had nearly overwhelmed her in a way she could only describe as religious.

“If only everyone could’ve seen it. It would change everything.”

But now her view was of the busy city below, with endless traffic and conflict. They had wanted to deliver a message of unity from half a million miles away, but the hardest part of their journey would be the last few feet from the stage to the crowd.

Pablo didn't care so much about the summer heat as the pain in his feet. He ran up and down the dusty turf field feeling his toes get pinched with each kick of the ball. He charged down the field for a few yards before the pain in his heel became unbearable. He stumbled and the ball rolled out of bounds. He pounded the grass with his fist and his teammate gave him a sympathetic look.

"He needs new shoes," Violeta said, watching her son wince in pain.

"He just bought him new cleats for Christmas," Ivan grumbled. "It feels like we're buying him shoes every month."

Pablo was growing like a weed and the cost of upgrading his equipment was taking a bit hit on their wallet. They loved to watch him play, but it didn't seem great to buy yet another pair of shoes only to see them be outgrown shortly afterwards.

"I can't run anymore," Pablo mumbled at the dinner table that night, gingerly taking off his socks to show off his blistered toe. "My shoes are too small."

"Can you not take off your shoes at the table?" Ivan grumbled.

"We know it's causing pain, mijo," Violeta knelt by him and looked at his red toes. "It's just that... you are growing faster than we can get you new shoes."

"Remember that place I saw online, Violeta? In Astoria. 'Reform Footwear'. I read that they are doing something with 3D printing and organic materials and they offer discounts for recycling."

"I remember seeing a flyer!" Violeta's eyes lit up. "It sounded too good to be true, but it's worth a look. As long as we're not constantly buying new plastic."

If they could help Pablo play without pain, and reduce their carbon footprint, it was appealing. If it led to them saving money over the long run, it could easily be worth their while.

The next Saturday, they took the bus westwards to the busy streets of Astoria. They turned onto 33rd Avenue and saw the under-spoken sign of the shoe store. Along its façade was a small garden with green vines cascading down.

When they stepped inside, Ivan could smell a particular earthiness in the air like they were inside a greenhouse. The space seemed simultaneously minimalist yet high-tech. The store felt empty aside from shelves of display shoes along the four walls.

"Hello there," a clerk rushed over to them with a warm smile. "My name is Olesya."

"My name is Pablo," he replied, shifting between his feet to avoid putting too much pressure on one.

"Those are nice cleats."

"Yes but they are way too small for him," Violeta explained. "And to be honest, we can't really keep buying him a new pair every couple months. So that's why we are here. We've heard you do something differently?"

"That's right," she gestured towards a large platform in the center of the store. "We create 3D-printed athletic wear custom fit to your feet with a mycelium polymer. They're sturdy enough for playing, but then you can bring them back and we can recycle the material in the back for new products. So once you're a customer with us, you can get a discount on your next pair."

"So it's a closed-loop system," Ivan observed.

"Yeah, no waste and a perfect fit."

"Printing?" Pablo was amazed.

"Exactly," Olesya replied. "First we can get a model of your foot using our optical scanner. It will capture the exact shape of your foot to ensure there's no more pinching."

She led Pablo over to the platform. "Step up there and take off your shoes. Then just stand still."

Pablo eagerly undid his laces and stepped out of his shoes. He practically leapt up onto the platform and placed his feet in the middle of it. His toes curled as they felt the smooth surface.

From unseen points around the platform, gentle green lights swept over his bare feet. On a large transparent display screen, a wireframe of his foot started being developed in real-time. Pablo watched with fascination at the details, first appearing as a faint, ghostly outline and then filling in with digital textures.

"This digital blueprint is going to be uploaded to our printers," Olesya pointed to the screen. "It allows us to get a valuable understanding of arch support, toe gaps, and even the minute differences between your left and right foot."

Pablo grew excited with the idea of a shoe made perfectly to fit him.

After the scan finished, Olesya moved over to a series of machines inside of large glass boxes in the back of the door.

"These are the source of our magic, the printers."

She initiated the print sequence. Inside, a robotic arm moved gracefully across the print bed, extruding a thin polymer. With each successive layer, the organic material built up, slowly forming the complex shape of a soccer cleat. Pablo closed his eyes and imagined how well he'd be able to play soccer. He could even smell something like freshly cut grass as the printer ran.

"Because we're not cutting and stitching, there's basically no material waste when we do the manufacturing. This is the future of footwear."

They waited around the store for about a full hour before the printer chimed softly. Olesya returned to the printer and lifted up the glass block gingerly. Using oven mitts, she grabbed them out of the printer and placed them on a ceramic tile.

"Okay Pablo, your shoes are ready," she announced. "Just give them a few minutes to cool."

Pablo rushed over to see. They were a deep, vibrant green like the color of the jungle. The cleat's studs were an extension of the sole rather than being added in later in the production.

"You should be able to put them on now," she told him.

Pablo swiped the left shoe from the tile and slid his foot into it. It didn't feel too tight, nor too lose. It was like putting on a second skin, able to fit snugly around him. He wiggled his toes, surprised by his newfound freedom. The second cleat felt the same.

He stood up and took a step forward, then bounced on the balls of his feet.

"Well, how do they feel?" Ivan wondered.

"My toes aren't being pinched. They're not falling out. They feel amazing!"

Ivan looked over at Violeta. The cost already felt worth it.

Next Saturday, Pablo ran out onto the field in his new cleats with a surge of confidence. He sprinted during warm-ups and jumped with a deftness that even surprised himself.

During the game, the ball deflected off an opposing defender and rolled his way. He took that chance to reach the ball. His new cleats dug into the turf with a perfect traction. He touched the ball slightly to get it into his control. Then, he wound back his leg and unleashed a powerful shot. The ball soared in a large arc over the goalie's read and slammed into a back corner of the net with a satisfying clang.

Pablo pumped his fist in the air as his teammates rushed over to cheer along with him. He knew that the cleats hadn't magically made him a better player, but unlocked his full potential.

"Look at him go," Violeta squeezed Ivan's hand. "He hasn't played like that in a year."

"I guess the cleats really do make the man," Ivan nodded proudly. "I guess it was worth the cost, but it'll be even better to get those cheap upgrades as he keeps growing up."

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President Sal had nothing to share to the public other than rage. The Atlas Corp had done nothing but interfere with his plans. The public news of his platinum heist had led to global condemnation. His brilliant plan had led the entire nation to become a pariah.

All of these denouncements had only made him angry. He felt betrayed by allies and embarrassed by enemies. He decided to launch a more aggressive offensive which would prove his claim by force. It would be a decisive assault aimed at the rich geological core beneath the Lechestan’s most vibrant agricultural zones. He weaponized the state media to discuss exclusively about national honor and stolen birthrights. He demanded that his forces stand up against the wealthy CEOs and break their “corpo-terrorist blockade”.

Joseph was awoken by the roaring of tanks surging down the primary road which bordered the two nations. Their railgun fired large rounds against patches of farmland, vaporizing everything and turning it into smoking craters.

He rushed out of his home and saw dozens of shock troops holding plasma rifles following behind the tanks. The soldiers were surrounding the Atlas Corp forces to a quick defeat, then they would turn their attention against any local resistance. He could hear scrams and explosions eerily close.

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Corey’s mom sat quietly in the kitchen with a cup of tea growing cold on the table. In her hands was a small shoebox she had come to deliver. Her face still contained the somber wrinkles of grief.

“Grandpa Arthur wanted you to have these things,” she said solemnly.

Inside the box were a collection of old, yellowed photographs. It also contained a polished silver locket. Corey picked it up gingerly. It felt cool to the touch.

“The executor of his estate said that was his most prized asset. And he wanted you to have it.”

Corey dug his nails into the edge of the locket and pulled it open. Inside was a small data core, last generation. His old PC, which he had been meaning to rebuild, still had a port he could insert this into.

“What is it?” he turned the locket around. It was a small device, so it couldn’t hold more than a few dozen terabytes. That was hardly enough to hold a small holo-movie. Maybe it contained some financial records? More photographs?

“It’s the server key to access his world,” she answered with a reverence he did not share.

“You mean that Minecraft thing?”

“It was his legacy. He poured his entire life into it. Our entire family did. And before he passed he said that he wanted you to be the next admin.”

Minecraft? Corey almost let out an impolite scoff. A game from the 2010s. Generations ago. He spent his time in a more modern game, full-immersion haptic sims where you could actually feel the heat from a dragon’s fires and the searing pain of being cut by a sword. Minecraft was just a collection of low-res blocks, without any of the sensory feedback that made a game feel real.

“I appreciate that he thought of me, but I don’t know if I am the right person for it.”

“He left instructions. Your system should be able to run the game, even if in an emulation mode. Just... please, Corey, log in at least once. For him.”

Corey kept his head low. He didn’t want to look at her. It felt embarrassing to be playing something so childish. Yet he loved his grandpa.

“Okay, I’ll log in tonight. After my guild’s raid.”

Hours later, as the excitement of the raid fell into a lull of checking his inventory for duplicates and visiting the auctions, his guildmates logged off one-by-one. He found himself looking at the silver locket that he had sat at the edge of his desk.

With a sigh he opened it up and inserted the data core into a port in the back of his machine.

“Unknown device detected,” his neuro-link chimed as the system tried to handle the new hardware.

He double-tapped the error window and went into the settings. Then he went into the Advanced Settings. Then he went into the Deep Advanced Settings, which had a series of options and flags that were introduced decades ago and never removed because some large corporation or another depended on it for running their entire operation.

He found the protocol for running vintage emulators and flipped it to true.

Then the world grew smaller. The fluid datascape that flowed all around him just by controlling his thoughts shut down. The haptic motors clicked softly as they shut off. He could no longer feel the soft pressure from his sensory pads. Instead, there was just a small two-dimensional window floating in a black void.

This change was jarring. Everything felt muffled, like his ears and eyes were stuffed with cotton.

He saw a logo titled Mojang Studios in front of him. It was a historical symbol he had only seen in his cultural history classes.

A soft, simple piano started to play in the background without the same oomph of multi-dimensional stereo designed by AIs for infinitely sized orchestras. With a hesitation, he clicked the Play button and loaded into the default world, simply named The Perry’s.

There was a sudden jolt as he was placed in a room surrounded by cubes. The emulator was trying to be clever by making the game immersive from his perspective, but it wasn’t perfect. The textures of the blocks were still strangely low-quality and too bright, making his eyes hurt. And the sound effects still felt like they were coming from a single point far away.

The walls were a repeating texture of rough brown planks that vaguely, very vaguely, looked like wood. Torches cast a blocky light. In front of him, near the door, was a wooden sign with black monospaced letters spelling out:

Great-Grandma Rose’s Starter House - Est. 2016

He looked down at his hands. They were just rectangular prisms. He didn’t have any fingers, or an elbow. He was just made of blocks. Yet they moved up and down as he expected. He took a step forward and he moved closer towards the door. Each step caused a dull thump on the floor beneath him.

He pushed the door open and it suddenly rotated open, without any transition or sound. Corey took a hesitant step outside.

He let out a gasp.

The small cabin was sitting on top of a small hill. Below it was a sprawling metropolis that stretched out as far as the game’s renderer could allow. Each building seemed to be designed completely differently, creating a mishmash of time and aesthetics.

To his right he saw a sleek tower rising so high it pierced the pixelated clouds made of white quartz with blackened windows. He recognized it as the work of his Aunt Kayla, the tech CEO. On his left was a vast farm which used Redstone to automate handling the long rows of wheat and carrots, each which seemed to shake back and forth in response to some virtual wind passing through. His grandmother’s grand project still seemed to be working even after she logged out for the last time.

He began to climb down the wooden steps, hopping down each block until he reached the gray-block streets of the city. So much of it seemed to be built by his ancestors. The place was a living museum.

He followed a path lit by Glowstone lamps, feeling particularly drawn to it. He passed by a massive wall made of wool of different colors. If he leaned back enough, he could see it was a pixel art mural depicting a cartoonish squirrel wearing a tiara and tutu. It seemed like an inside joke that he knew nothing about.

Further down this path, he saw a helicopter sitting in an empty lot. The vehicle seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of its construction. Corey could immediately find a key flaw in the design which would make it impossible to fly. That was probably why the original builder had abandoned it.

The path soon left the city’s bounds up another hill. The hill was taller than the previous one. It transitioned into the rocky blocks depicting a rough mountain. Then, it transitioned into snowy peaks as he continued climbing.

Near the peak, the tall, haphazard stones of the mountain were cleared away for a flat plateau with an elegantly designed garden. Tiny pixelated flowers swung in the wind and were surrounded by tall weeping willows. Inside the garden were dozens of small signs, each hosting a tiny memorial.

Here is where Daddy taught me to fight a Creeper. He fell out of his chair laughing when I screamed out loud. - Abagail

Abagail was his mom’s name.

We came here the night before our wedding. We practiced our vows here, under a blocky arch. - Rob and Clara

His aunt and uncle.

In memory of Cocoa, the best dog we could’ve asked for. She loved chasing the squirrels. - Everyone

He passed by each one, learning a great deal about his family’s history. Each one told a different story. Every memory had its own place to sit here in perpetuity.

The climb to the peak was gentle, rising only a few blocks as the path wound up to the edge. It was the tallest location in the entire world. He looked out at the setting sun.

There a small wooden bench nearby. He took a seat and looked out at it, a world that had been started by Perry’s generations ago. Every person in his family had managed to make their mark here and their legacy would continue to the next generation.

Then he noticed one final sign sitting to the side. He could only read it from the perspective of the bench.

This is all yours now, Corey. Place your first block whenever you’re ready - Grandpa Arthur

The apathy he had been feigning finally crumbled away. He felt his vision blur with tears as the magnitude hit him, really hit him. His late grandfather had left a message just for him and gave him the responsibility of this world originally crafted by his great-grandmother’s hands. Countless Perry’s had been part of it. This place was a family tree built out of voxels.

He opened up his inventory, an archaic two-dimensional grid of squares. He only had a single, rough cube of gray cobblestone in there.

Corey turned to an empty patch of grass on the the opposite side of the sign. He aimed with the crosshairs and then placed the block.

With an instant, it appeared in the world with a soft thump.

It wasn’t much, but it would be the cornerstone of his family’s future.

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Author: Amy Chan

Eater NY

It’s been all over your feeds for the past week. The question on everyone’s minds is whether this is for real or another lie to draw in tourists and yuppie foodies.

I arrived at Reykjavik Igloo on a Tuesday night. A block away from the East River, you can see the neon glow of new Manhattan construction reflected against the dark water. It was raining that night, the kind of freezing rain that always follows the weeks after Christmas. Despite the weather, fifty people stood under the LED awning that marked the entrance to the restaurant. Their faces were lit up by their phones, clad in hydrophobic shoes and jackets made from recycled plastic. They, like myself, were waiting for a single, four-ounce scoop of their “Nocturnal Sea” Mousse.

This is no ordinary mousse. As I stand in line, I can hear the key ingredient whispered down the line like a game of telephone. It’s made with seal milk.

Let’s just sit with that for a moment. This isn’t using almonds, oats, or some kind of nut in the Amazon we’ve yet to exploit and gentrify. Seal milk. The restaurant’s marketing claims this will give patrons a “full microbiome reset”. The milk contains rare yet natural sugars called “oligosaccharides” which act as a superfood for the colonies of Bifidobacterium that live in your gut.

So if you’re on a diet, don’t worry about this being a dessert. It’s far more like an optimization. Of course, this also seems like the kind of wellness hacks that we heard about every other week in the feeds.

By the time I actually got inside and situated at a table, my own gut bacteria were causing my stomach to rumble with anticipation. The restaurant’s aesthetic is much in line with its Icelandic origin: minimalist, functional, with lots of light wood and straight edges. My server, a young woman probably still in college, scooped a small, dark dollop of this mysterious mousse into a ceramic bowl and placed it in front of me.

I’d describe the mousse as very dark, like the sky on a cloudy, moonless night. As I took a small scoop with my spoon, I couldn’t help but admire how glossy and smooth it looked.

I held the spoon up to my nose and took a hesitant sniff. I mean, I was prepared for something fishy or salty, but it only smelled like bitter dark chocolate.

When I placed it in my mouth, I was all prepared for it to taste like cod liver oil or sushi. Instead it was a rich chocolate flavor. They use 70% single-origin Madagascan dark. That chocolate alone has a sharp taste that is worth tasting on its own. As the mousse coated my tongue, I could taste more flavors emerging. There was the bitterness of burnt sugar, like a perfectly caramelized crème brûlée.

I would be remiss if I didn’t describe the texture as well. It was like a heavy cream that still managed to melt in my mouth without any graininess. It was richer than gelato and silkier than any pot de crème I’ve ever had. As I swallowed the first bite, I struggled to make sense of what I had just tasted. The aftertaste clung to the back of my throat, a lingering sensation that reminded me of a freshly shucked oyster. It was pleasant. And it was enough to convince me to get a second bite.

After my delightful dessert, I spoke with Bent Torsson, the brainchild of this bold dish. He takes his minimalist design to his fashion choice too, as he wore a simple black turtleneck and long black slacks. He was tall and slim, evidently a beneficiary of his own product.

He was born in Vik, a small town in Iceland known for its famous black sand beaches. His parents were fishers, and he grew up around the sea. From a young age he admired the sea and all the wildlife that lived in it. Seals in particular were his favorite creature. They were able to survive in the harshest conditions of the country, without the benefit of a house and electricity.

When asked about the briny aftertaste, he explained it to me. “That’s the terroir. The phantom flavors pulled from the same sea these seals were born in. We wanted to make sure we honor their original home.”

He showed me a map on his tablet of the exact location where the seals are milked. “We chose a single, protected colony of hooded seals that live in the sea around Greenland. The raw milk is rich in calories, as you’d expect. It’s more than 60% fat. The baseline flavor is a bit like a thick fishy milkshake. Our profits go back to protecting them. Sustainability is important to what we do.”

Bent went on, explaining his process for transforming this sludge into something we can eat. A cryogenic homogenization process mixed with waters turn the thick liquid into something that has a smoother texture. There is still a gaminess which is balanced with the high-cacao chocolate and a controlled Maillard reaction to draw out the sweetness into something palatable.

It was an astonishing number of preparation steps to take their fatty milk and process it. Even that final briny taste seemed to be an intentional note, even if it was in fact a byproduct of the milk’s origin they couldn’t cover up. Torsson had a big grin on his face the entire time we spoke. “I know it’s unconventional,” he admitted. “But that’s what makes it so exciting.”

And the thing is... he is right.

As I left Reykjavik Igloo, walking around puddles back to the subway, I couldn’t stop thinking about that aftertaste. This whole night, the mousse, the conversation, all represented our post-natural world. We are so far removed from the natural way to eat. Our fruits will come by the shipload from halfway around the world so that we can have strawberries in January. We can grow chicken meat in a lab without ever harming a living creature.

Perhaps the culinary innovations of the day are more about conquering an ingredient, bending it to your will, and then writing a story interesting enough to collect $28 from your customers.

And the story of Reykjavik Igloo is just one example of this new future, with its exotic core ingredient and a claim to wellness that sounds plausible. I’m sure by next spring, there will be more artisanal processing labs popping up across the city with their own attempts to be the next superfood. It leaves a food critic, this food critic, with a lot more questions than when I started.

Captain Paula surveyed the situation below from one of the SPAVs. She could see everything filtered through a tactical display in front of her. Vorlagian troops were highlighted in a dark red, Atlas Corp protected zones in a light blue, and Lechestan infrastructure highlighted in green.

She felt a familiar pang of adrenaline. She’d left national armies long ago, tired of fighting wars over minuscule plots for politicians and nationalistic agendas. When Atlas Corp offered something different. reinforcing a shared reality, she leapt at the chance. She preferred the world of clear agreements and functional systems over ideological conflicts.

“Troops are deployed Captain,” her second-in-command, Chen, said.

“Good. Although I can’t help wondering if we’re here to uphold a principle or protect a product.”

“Both I think, Captain,” Chen answered. “These farmers are exactly where they’ve always been. The data marks their property. Our job is to keep it that way.”

Miles away, Dr. Knoll was also watching the escalating situation from body cams worn on Vorlagian soldiers. She had been tasked with finding some scraps of historical “proof” for President Sal’s claims, although she hadn’t expected what he would do with it.

She had spent weeks in the archives, working at all hours of the day to find ancient land deeds, drafted treaties, and maps with hastily drawn lines, then summarize them into some sort of digestible narrative. Yet despite all her research, the pieces refused to fit. Their historical claims were flimsy at best, but that was enough for Sal. He wanted a convenient narrative for a populace yearning for national pride after a decade of economic stagnation.

One evening of studying, she found a hidden directory in the culture ministry’s network. She tapped into it, using the admin privileges she had been granted. The directory wasn’t historical, it had current geological data. She scrolled through terabytes of high-res seismic imaging reports, recent core samples with spectroscopy, and geological surveys. Every file had been created in the last few months.

All of this data made clear that there was a vast, untapped supply of platinum reserves directly beneath the Lechestan ground. Yet now it was all just productive agriculture. Yet this platinum was a critical component in short supply for next-generation neurological interfaces and supercapacitors necessary for Sal’s military modernization programs. All the worry about history was a smokescreen in order to seek out the mineral wealth which could break the years of stagnation.

The revelation made her sick, and she grew even sicker as she realized the role she had played in this invasion she was watching from afar. She had admired the self-sufficiency of the Lechestan people on the other side of the border. While she was a scholar, she had appreciated their willingness to carve out their own life fulfillment. Now she was concerned that these beautiful farms would be ripped apart for profit.

Read more

Naomi’s student tablet pinged. She saw the notification was from the school, sharing the semester’s reading list. As the class president, she felt a responsibility to Springfield’s intellectual ecosystem.

“Those are the new books?” asked Hugo as he leaned over her shoulder. “I’ve never heard of the ‘Cartesian Echo’ before. Or the ‘Solar Flares on a Silent Sea’. Have you?”

Naomi scrolled through the list: Whispers from the Geothermal Deep, The Indifferent Stars, Synaptic Drift and the Self... There was a grandiose from the titles, almost like they were machine-generated. They also lacked the familiar authors that they had read in earlier classes.

“The teachers must just be getting creative this year,” chuckled Kim, as she tipped a watering can over one of the classroom’s potted plants. “Probably just some stuff we haven’t been exposed to yet. Look, just do a search for the titles and see what comes up.”

Naomi tapped on the tablet’s search bar and typed in “The Indifferent Stars + Ebook”. Instantly, the results loaded. The top hit included the tags of “philosophy’, “existentialism”, and “21st-century nihilism”. The website looked like a clean, minimalistic blog called “Veritas Fulcrum”.

She found several other titles in the same way on similarly designed websites: “Open Scroll Press”, “Digital Quill Archives”, and others. Download links were prominent.

“This is easy,” Hugo, pulled out his phone and started to download them. “They all look like obscure gems. That’s probably better than reading the same old stuff over and over.”

Later that evening, Naomi wrapped a blanket around her as she sat in her bed. The city’s bright lights looked like stars through her translucent blinds. She opened up the ebook she downloaded. Her book app launched and processed the file. The Indifferent Stars had a cryptic cover of bright dots placed in seemingly random places, not too different from what was glowing on her wall.

She started to read it. The prose was dense, with a lot of complex, long-winded sentences paired with very specific metaphors to scientific phenomena. The characters discussed cosmic insignificance, the illusion of meaning, and human greed encoded in each person’s DNA.

She didn’t find the book inherently disagreeable, yet she also didn’t enjoy reading it like she did so many other books. The book seemed to revel in its own bleak outlook. The way it framed empathy as a mistake and community as a sort of self-deception seemed to make her feel cynical. It was like telling people to just give up on society and move to a commune.

She put the tablet down when it reached her bedtime. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but there was a vague residue clinging to her thoughts.

Naomi’s first class was held in the school’s ‘agora’, the open-air courtyard beneath the a large solar-sail awning. Mr. Sanchez taught her Civics and Critical Thinking class. She liked him, a man who knew a lot of different things and always encouraged open discussion. The day’s lesson was on information sources.

She raised her hand hesitantly.

“Mr. Sanchez, I wanted to ask about this semester’s reading list. The selection was definitely unusual. I started reading The Indifferent Stars last night.”

“Okay, and what are your first impressions?”

“It just... it’s very negative. It’s almost mocking any idea that could be positive. Are you familiar with it? The author is ‘Corvus Blackwood’, but I couldn’t learn much about him.”

“Blackwood?” Sanchez folded his hands together. “No, I can’t say that rings a bell. But there are always new thinkers. We’re far from a shortage of ideas. What did you feel was particularly negative? The purpose of reading is not to always find things you agree with, sometimes it’s to understand a point of view different from your own and define your own views in turn.”

“It’s not challenging,” she didn’t know exactly how to explain. “It’s just cynical. It wants to believe that trying to make things better is foolish.”

Some of the other students, who had started reading different titles, nodded. A few defended the books as “pragmatic” and “edgy”.

“Naomi, it seems like you have an interesting critique. I would suggest you keep reading. Keep questioning its arguments. Examine the evidence it provides, or the evidence it lacks. Maybe highlight specific passages that seem most worthwhile to discuss. As all of you get deeper into reading, we can hold further discussions. I’m always happy to see critical engagement.”

He didn’t exactly dismiss her worry, but seemed to classify it as just another academic thing to study rather than something that felt fundamentally wrong. She couldn’t quite blame him either. She hadn’t presented any real evidence, just some feelings. But the passages she read continued to linger in her mind.

In the school’s greenhouse after school, Kim was in busy arguing with two other students on resource allocation. Their arguments were focused around “individual advancement” and the “folly of teamwork”, pulling passages straight out of The Cartesian Echo for justification.

At the same time, during an SGA meeting, Naomi found her proposal for a peer-tutoring system to also be met with surprising pushback.

“Why should the smarter students waste their time on those unable to keep up during class?” Ernesto scoffed dismissively. “Some of us are more genetically aligned to the curriculum and that should be rewarded. Cognitive resources should be allocated to the highest priorities.”

The words seemed so bleak to Naomi, and bleaker were the agreements from other students. Then she saw a copy of Synaptic Drift laying on the edge of his desk.

The culture of the school seemed to change rapidly. Open discussions quickly died when someone raised a predefined viewpoint, often citing one of the new books. Even casual conversations seemed harsher, with barbed jokes and a lack of care.

Naomi had to learn more about these books. She started with her current read, but could find next to nothing about “Corvus Blackwood”. There was just the Veritas Fulcrum blog. He hadn’t published anything else. He didn’t seem to be associated with any university. There weren’t even interviews with him.

The other books in the list were written by equally obscure authors. Names like “Unit 731” or “Lex Iconoclast” led to generic author biographies, sterile blogs, and a series of links hosting the same books. The whole thing was a closed loop.

“It’s like these authors don’t even exist. Aside from these specific websites, they have no prescence,” she vented to Hugo one afternoon in the greenhouse. Mr. Sanchez was standing in the corner, carefully pruning a bonsai.

“Yeah, I was interested in The Cartesian Echo at first, but it also confused me. I tried to look up some sort of legit review of it and there was nothing. Just a few five-stars on the download site itself. All of them felt like they were written by AI.”

“I worry that it’s having a bad effect on the others. I heard Ernesto basically reciting Synaptic Drift verbatim. Look, I’ve been keeping track.”

She pulled out a document on her phone where she had been storing quotes that her friends were using and their origin in one of the assigned books.

“Altruism is merely a complex survival algorithm, easily discarded when individual parameters are threatened, from The Indifferent Stars.

“True community is a myth. The social contract is a chain forged from mutual fear, not mutual respect, from The Cartesian Echo.”

“All progress is an illusion, a momentary eddy in the inevitable entropic decay of systems, from Solar Flares on a Silent Sea.”

“These all sound the same. All have the same nihilist message.”

“Exactly. They’re designed to shed everything except your own personal benefits.”

She decided to send an email to the district, the ones who had come up with this curriculum. Within a few minutes, she received a polite yet impersonal block of text.

Thank you for sending your question. Our curriculum module has been put together through a close analysis of academic recommendations and cultural trends. They were selected for their relevance, complexity, and potential for discussion.

Naomi was only left frustrated by the answer.

“Academic recommendations? Potential for discussion? It’s just the same discussion wrapped up in different covers.”

Aristov saw a social media post where a student quoted “Corvus Blackwood” and smiled. He leaned forward in his ergonomic chair and typed a few times in order to deploy his latest site to market his recently “written” book: The Broken Compass and the Illusion of Benevolence.

A year ago he had been a history teacher and was promoted to work for the district. And then some manager decided it would be better to plan the entire curriculum with AI, pushing his career into obsolescence. He had spoken up about it several times, since he saw firsthand how easily young minds could be swayed by a narrative.

He decided to fight back against the system that had come for him first. He needed to give the students a harsh dose of reality before they faced the same existential disappointment. He didn’t see himself as spreading hate, but teaching the truth without sugarcoating no matter how bitter. Now he saw that his lessons were starting to bear fruit.

Naomi was walking from her locker to lunch when she suddenly saw Ernesto and two others who had turned into enthusiastic readers of the new curriculum. The three of them had cornered Iryna, a freshman who volunteered for the city parks on the weekend.

“What do you have there? Another one of your city greening projects?” Ernesto sneered.

Iryna kept her eyes down and didn’t say anything.

“Protecting nature? Nature is supposed to be about competition. Only the strongest survive. Lex Iconoclast demonstrates that clearly.”

“A city with more biodiversity creates a healthier ecosystem for everyone,” she stuttered.

“Everyone?” he scoffed. “There is no everyone. Only individuals pursuing their personal self-interest. Your fuzzy-headed idealism is just a biological inefficiency.”

Naomi knew he was quoting The Indifferent Stars nearly verbatim.

“Maybe stick to something you are actually good at,” he took a step forward. Iryna stumbled back, tripping over her shoelace and falling against the lockers.

“Ernesto!” Mr. Sanchez’s voice boomed down the hallway.

He stepped out of his classroom with a grim face.

“Ernesto, step away,” he said firmly. “This behavior is not acceptable in our school.”

Ernesto and his goons dispersed towards the cafeteria. Naomi helped Iryna to her feet and stared down the hallway where the bullies had just gone.

“Mr. Sanchez, the things he was saying... Lex Iconoclast...” Naomi remarked.

“This has gone on far enough,” Sanchez said with remorse. “Reading challenging books is one thing, but they have seemed to escalate all the way to targeted harassment.”

Iryna and Naomi spent their lunch in Sanchez’s classroom. As the student president, she felt responsible for improving student quality of life and felt guilty for letting the problem reach this point.

“We need to prove these books are somehow manipulative,” Naomi proposed. “Not that these are just edgy or disagreeable, but intentionally designed to reach this outcome.”

“What if we visit the library archives?” offered Iryna. “If there really is a Corvus Blackwood then he should probably be present in the physical records. If not, he might not be real at all. He might be... might be AI.”

After school, Naomi and Iryna traveled across the city to the library’s archives, located in the second basement of the structure. It was usually quiet, as it was this afternoon as well. They spent several hours at a terminal, cross-referencing the titles and authors against the library’s catalogs and other global databases. They looked at copyright logs and even newspaper archives. Nothing came up. No early works. No literary reviews. Suddenly they just appeared, at nearly the same time the reading list was published.

In fact, there was an uncanniness to it. Even the website registrations seemed to only have been set a month prior, just a few minutes before she had received that original reading list email. She checked the second website. Then the third. None of the books were real. They seemed to have been manifested at the same time the reading list was created. The hallucinations were manifested into reality.

“Iryna, I don’t think these books are real. Not really. The district probably used an AI model to build the list without thinking about it. Then someone came in afterwards and provided the work.”

“That’s why all the books sound the same. It’s one author, maybe not even a real one.”

The next morning, they described their findings to Mr. Sanchez, who listened carefully with a grave expression on his face.

“So someone has been filling our students with a sort of ideological sludge in the face of an AI that the administration much trust without fact checking. The parents haven’t raised any issues either. And the students are already acting on these poisonous ideas. So any plan we make to change things won’t be easy.”

“We know the truth now. How do we get others to see it?”

The gymnasium was packed with parents at an emergency meeting which had been called by the principal and a handful of bleachers. Principal Hasan had been hesitantly supportive of the idea after Sanchez and a few others protested. After the bulling incident, it did seem more urgent to address the issue before things escalated further.

Sanchez stood at a central podium with Naomi standing closely behind him. The presentation walked through her findings, passed through the greater authority of a teacher. He described the void where the authors had no history and how a linguistic analysis between books showed a single source. The books did not exist prior to the reading list, and SEO tactics had managed to get them to the front of each search for the students to find.

Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Some parents had been convinced, but many more were still skeptical. A few students in the audience, including Ernesto, rolled their eyes but were clearly uncomfortable.

“Hold on,” one parent stood up. “My son told me how much he’s been enjoying The Cartesian Echo. He said it was the best thing he ever read, the most thought-provoking. Are we supposed to limit what our kids read? Can they not handle challenging ideas?”

“There’s a profound difference between challenging ideas and slop,” Sanchez argued. “We want to encourage genuine critical thought, but these books were maliciously designed to promote cynicism. They want the reader to adopt these conclusions wholesale and destroy the fabric of a learning community.”

“We are still looking for the source of these books,” the principal added. “Since we have the domain registrations, we have been able to trace the source to someone in Springfield. And they must be someone with some familiarity of our curriculum planning.”

The room went silent. Aristov was sitting quietly under the harsh lights. Then he stood up slowly.

“It was me,” he admitted quietly.

The entire crowd turned and looked at the man as they spoke in hushed tones. They didn’t see a monster. He was a tired man wearing thick glasses and a wrinkled blazer.

“I wrote all the books. Well, I prompted them. It took me a few hours to put together the entire collection of works for the curriculum.”

“But why?” the principal asked with exasperation.

“Because you let me go,” he answered as he climbed down the narrow staircase. His loafers caused the metal bleachers to groan with each step. “The district thought they could replace human curation with a simple AI. When I saw the reading list was made up of hallucinated titles without anyone in the district caring, I decided I would show you all the risks of outsourcing education.”

“So you thought it was appropriate to poison the well to prove the water wasn’t filtered?” Throne shot back.

“The books are fake. The authors are fake. But the students are real. Their feelings are real. Maybe you’ll actually care about their education now.”

The school’s security guard gently escorted Aristov from the gym. He didn’t resist.

“Now I’ll go. I’m sure I can find somewhere better to be,” he replied with some venom. “Don’t bother trying legal action. It’s not illegal to write a book. If anything, you’re liable for assigning them.”

He then turned and stared directly at Naomi. She could see a small amount of pity in his eyes. She didn’t know if he was the hero or the villain of the story. In some way, not knowing was an even more challenging concept to grasp. Perhaps there was a lesson she learned from the books after all.

Healing took time. The toxicity that had seeped into the school’s culture couldn’t be easily reversed. Even if the reading list was replaced, the original morals still permeated. The hallways remained quiet. The trust between students remained fractured.

Mr. Sanchez organized a “Spirit Week” in the Agora. They replaced all the desks with cushions and chairs. Students struggled to look at each other. It was only by the third day that the tension started to thaw.

After school one afternoon, Iryna was struggling to carry a heavy bucket of soil when she stumbled. Ernesto, who had been standing nearby, stepped forward to catch her and save the bucket from spilling out.

“I’ve got it,” he reassured her. “It’s heavy than it looks.”

“Thanks Ernesto. Can you carry it over to the sunflowers?”

“Yeah, I can do that. Efficient allocation of strength, I guess,” he said, trying to make a joke.

“Sure, I guess that’s what teamwork is all about,” she murmured.

It turns out that the Chicago Sun-Times got into some controversy for hallucinating a summer reading list. While that’s embarrassing, it was caught because the books didn’t exist. If someone had created, or generated, these books, they could have a strong way to influence teens in negative ways.

Dale stood in the middle of his lawn, surrounded by lawnchairs and dandelions, and looked up at the sky. The sun was beating down, cooking the small yellow flowers hiding in the cracks of the concrete. Dale’s focus was what was not in the sky overhead.

“It’s so blue today,” Dale grunted, feeling a bit of personal offense.

“It’s a very nice day,” Chloe flicked through news articles on her phone, sitting in one of the chairs under a large umbrella. A fly buzzed back and forth across her face.

“It’s wrong,” Dale’s scoff was sharp. “I haven’t seen a single trail all week. It’s not normal.”

Chloe bit the inside of her cheek, trying to gather up all her energy to be patient. She had tried this conversation before and it didn’t go well. But she felt a responsibility to try bridging the gap between them.

“It’s the new program that uses atmospheric forecasting to predict where a contrail might form. It’s just when the water vapor of a jet freezes around soot particles. It only forms when the air is super cold and humid.”

“I know what they are,” Dale interrupted. He didn’t look over at her, but at the phone in her hand. “But what’s their game? What are they trying to do to the sky?”

“The contrails trap heat,” Chloe continued, trying her best to avoid getting defensive. “Atmospheric predictive routing just tells planes to change their altitude a bit to avoid those pockets. It helps them save on fuel too.”

Dale stared at the screen as if it was a massive bug. Chloe could see his breathing get shallower, as if the information was a threat.

“So they’re not even hiding it. They’re putting it right there on the screen,” Dale murmured. His eyes were growing more frantic. He was digging even deeper.

“Dad, what are you talking about?” Chloe asked innocently.

“Don’t you see?” Dale spoke with great excitement. “They didn’t want us to connect the dots. They don’t want us to look up anymore. They’ve moved onto phase 2, making the aerosols completely invisible.”

Dale started pacing back and forth, crushing the small budding dandelions back into the ground. “They want you to think the trails are gone, but they’re just trying to misdirect us.”

“Dad, that doesn’t make sense,” Chloe sighed, dropping her phone into her lap as her hope drained out of her.

“Of course it does,” he shot back. “They’ve got a new formula to dissipate the trails before we can even see them. Or... maybe they’re not even using aerosols anymore. They’ve got tiny nanobots... that blend in with the sky. All this,” he gestured to the sky. “It’s them covering up their tracks. You can’t just use aluminum foil to block their mind-control waves. They’ve got something new.”

Chloe looked at her father’s wild eyes and then up at the sky. It was just a sky. Big and blue. Her body sank into the chair as her motivation for a conversation vanished. Her father hated the sky and there was no way she could change that.

Dale’s enthusiasm faded as he saw the wall go up in her eyes. She was shutting down again, unwilling to listen. He walked over to the rusty cooler sitting on the back stoop and pulled out a Bud Light. He wiped the condensation from the can and the drops of water on the concrete immediately started evaporating.

With a Pssht-fizz, he cracked the can open and started to drink it.

The two of them sat in silence, still unable to connect. Neither of them would change their mind, yet were forced to spend another bright, warm day together.

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Joseph looked at the drone feed on his screen. It was late afternoon, so the feed showed rays of golden light reflecting in the soybean fields as small drones, no larger than a child’s hand, buzzed to individual plants and tended to its care. Everything was powered by open-source algorithms designed and refined by the community.

Community was important here, as it was all they had. They lived far from the gleaming central cities and the surrounding suburban districts. They had decided to eschew the politics and decadency and built something from the ground that was all their own.

“Joseph!” Luke burst through the door holding a datapad in his hands.

“Luke, I thought you’d gone home for the night.”

“I had to come back when I saw President Sal was going to make an announcement. It’s something I thought you should see. He’s finally done it.”

President Sal, known informally as the Iron Fist, stood in front of holographic projections of national flags and a chimerical creature that stood as a symbol of his reign.

“I have spoken deeply with archivists and historians. Historically, undeniably, the Lechestan is does in fact actually belong to us, the Barbarussos.”

He spoke more about maps which were centuries old and old relics found buried deep in the earth. The holographic projections changed to show off these pieces of evidence to justify his autocratic land grab. He finished by calling upon Atlas Corp, the ubiquitous global mapping authority, to immediately update its digital borders to reflect these new findings.

“I can’t believe this,” Joseph muttered with a dry mouth. “What ancient maps? My grandmother was born on this farm. It’s been here for at least six generations. He thinks he can make historical claims?”

“What are we supposed to do? We’re just a few people. We can’t mount a defense against a regular army,” Luke’s worry was clear.

“For now he’s not proposing a full invasion, just adjusting the borders. Whatever happens next is up to Atlas Corp.”

The next morning, Evelyn Reed published a short video from her minimalist London apartment.

“I want to address recent discourse,” she began, speaking calmly and professionally. “Our mission at Atlas Corp is the same as it’s always been: to map reality with unimpeachable accuracy. We do this by blending data from many sources. Our geospatial data is verified by a dozen sources from satellite telemetry, ground sensors, and hyperlocal community input. Our focus is on the _current state_ of our world. We don’t want to become mired into debates of the past. Borders are political constructs, but ones that are designed to reflect legally recognized frameworks and human existence. We do not plan to draw them based on arbitrary and unilateral claims in any case. That would betray our mission and the trust that billions have placed in us.

Joseph was happy to see that someone was willing to stand up for them, at least in a single, symbolic way.

Then he got an alert from some of his agricultural drones. He pulled up the camera feeds and saw Vorlagian soldiers gathering on the other side of the border. Trucks and tanks seemed to be massing along the border. Hastily built checkpoints were being constructed along the roads between the two regions.

He felt sick to his stomach. Sal was going to invade in order to claim his territory by force. If a symbolic gesture wasn’t enough, he’d use force and violence to determine the current state of the world. Joseph thought about calling Luke, but decided against it. He might still be asleep. He might be enjoying a breakfast with his family. It’d be better to let him enjoy it for now. Once the tanks rolled in, they’d lose that tranquility.

He clipped the drone footage and uploaded it to a dropbox that urban journalists had setup a while ago for anonymous reporting. He signed the video using the dropbox’s PGP key and hoped that his plea for help would go answered.

Joseph walked outside with binoculars. He looked through and saw the large gray vehicles rumbling over the border. Their heavy tires tore up the road and let out a loud rumble which would’ve woken up anyone who had still been sleeping.

Then there was a sudden roar coming from overhead. He jerked his head and looked up at new entities appearing in the sky. There were large drones, far larger than the ones in their community. Through his binoculars, he could see on the side the logo of Atlas Corp.

—

For years, Atlas Corp had quietly been building up a “Global Geospatial Security Division”, a fancy word that was used to obscure the concept of a private army. As more people relied on their data, from climate models to supply chains, it became increasingly clear that their map was a matter of global stability. Disruptions to their digital map could lead to genuine disruptions in the world and the world order.

In events where corporate bureaucracy wasn’t enough, this division could enforce their map accuracy backed by force. Their mission was to preserve data and territorial integrity and never go on the offensive.

Sleek solar-powered atmospheric vehicles soared overhead, deployed from one of their regional data centers. The SPAVs were sensor platforms that could perform high-res mapping and provide rapid transport for half a dozen ground units.

As they reached the border, the bottom of the SPAVs opened up and soldiers began falling out of the sky. They ripped cords on their backpacks and large parachutes burst out. As they started to float slowly to the ground, they detached large, long objects from the bag and started approaching the column of trucks. From Joseph’s perspective, they didn’t look like guns. They seemed to be non-lethal sonic deterrents.

Their mission was to defend the borders exactly as already defined by Atlas Corp. Geospatial integrity backed up by defensive force.

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Oliver found himself disappointed by the reception to his first public exhibition. At the end of his animation, “Corals in Flight”, the audience had been polite, but not enthused. Critics wrote little notes on scraps of paper and placed into a box as they shuffled their way out to see other works at the festival.

He was left with a box of feedback, most of them lukewarm or negative. “Interesting use of color” was the most positive. The rest were variations of “too ambitious for a debut” and “lacks a clear story”.

Oliver wasn’t used to this kind of reception. Back in college, and in high school, he had been praised and put on a golden path towards success. He had seen himself as a prodigy.

When he was growing up in the governor’s mansion, everything seemed so simple. His childhood home was a grand, solar-powered mansion surrounded by bioswells which filtered the seawater and teemed with colorful marine life. Elevated monorails zipped past the panoramic windows, putting him in the center of the city’s rich culture that connected the vibrancy of the Caribbean with the city’s towering skyscrapers.

His entire childhood seemed to pulse with new art forms and music. With his privileged connections, he had access to the best schools and mentors. He had always assumed he would quickly rise to the top of the zeitgeist.

But after this stunning setback, he returned to the small loft he rented in the arts district thanks to his family’s financial support. The loft was cluttered with high-tech holopads, 3D printers, and various art supplies. The last frame of his animation was still displayed on a large television hanging on the wall, which now seemed to mock him. He thought it was a perfect representation of his vision that connected humans to the ocean, but the audience had not agreed.

There was a surprising rap at the door that broke him out of his self-pity.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

“It’s me,” came the soft reply. Kris.

She was a fellow artist he had met a few months ago at a gallery opening. Tall, blonde, and always dressed in colorful sundresses. She was a hot topic in the local art world, and even hotter in-person. Still, despite his attraction to her, he didn’t really feel like socializing tonight.

“Please, Oliver. I just want to check on you,” she said.

He sighed and opened the door. “Alright, come in.”

She stood there at the entrance with her dark, expressive eyes assessing him. She was everything he wasn’t: confident, authentic, and carefree. And unlike him, she really did come from nothing. Her own short, about the mangroves, received a standing ovation. He agreed, it had a brilliance that he found impossible to replicate.

“That was rough, Oliver,” she offered politely, though her tone was bordering on a patronizing pity.

“I think it’s just the wrong audience,” he replied defensively. “They don’t understand my vision.”

“It’s not about creating a perfect vision,” she shook her head. “Mollywood is about making a deep connection with someone. You need to see things differently.”

“I guess you agree I have no vision, then,” he snapped, still wallowing.

“No, I mean it literally,” she said, stepping closer. He could smell the faint jasmine wafting from her hair. “You need to see the world differently.”

She reached into her small leather bag and pulled out a small vial. He looked at it closely. It looked like a normal pill, like an Asprin or something, but it seemed to glow faintly with an inner light.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a catalyst. We call it ‘Myuze’.”

“Is it a drug?”

“It’s a bit more than that,” she said mysteriously. “Imagine if a bird’s tweet sounded more like a rich, harmonizing symphony, where each note had its own color and texture. Ideas would become tangible shapes that you could hold and change. It re-routes your neural pathways to create cross-sensory perception. Your artistic vision changes and expands in areas you couldn’t even imagine.”

“Do you use it?”

“Many of us do,” she replied. “We all benefit from tapping into an infinite well of creativity.”

“I don’t know...” he hesitated. “If I take it, will I still be me?”

“It just helps unlock the creativity that’s already inside of you. You have good ideas. You just need a little help with your perspective.”

Oliver felt his stomach twist. His father would definitely never approve of this. He felt like he was doing something wrong, even dangerous. But his mind was distracted by the smile and hope on Kris’s face. She believed in him at a time when he didn’t believe in himself. There was something alluring about unlocking new parts of his mind and becoming as authentic as her.

“Okay, how much?” he asked with a dry throat.

“I’ll give you this one for free Ollie,” she gave him a genuine smile. “But only if you make something good.”

“I promise.”

“Good then,” she handed him the vial, her fingers brushing his for a moment. “Then welcome to Mollywood.”

The pill tasted metallic and it seemed to sting his tongue as he swallowed it with a splash of sparkling water. Kris was sitting down on his couch, sipping a cup of herbal tea.

“Just relax,” she advised, observing how tense his body was. “Breathe easily and let your brain recalibrate.”

He took a seat at the other end of the couch and wrapped his arms around a pillow. He closed his eyes, waiting for it to happen. He didn’t know what that meant or what to expect.

Then, something flickered.

It wasn’t a light, not exactly. It was like... Well, he could hear the monorail passing by outside, but now he could see it despite his eyes being closed. It was if a large indigo shape passed from right to left across his mind’s eye. He could see Kris’s quiet breathing as a series of gentle silver waves that reminded him of the ocean. His own thoughts seemed to sparkle in rainbow colors, in colors he couldn’t even understand or name.

When he opened his eyes, he found the entire room had changed. It was as if he was seeing everything through a kaleidoscope. The walls seemed to be glowing, as if they were made of some phosphorescent material. The air itself seemed to shimmer with tiny motes of light that danced around him.

Kris asked him something. As she spoke, he could see her words as colorful shapes that jumped around the room in arcs before fading away.

He now understood what she meant about cross-sensory perception.

He turned to the TV, where his animation was still paused. He decided to watch it again. This time, he could understand what the critics had meant. The colors were just alright. There was too much blue and not enough contrast. The story was muddled and the characters were underdeveloped.

As he wondered how to change it, he began to see colors emerge from the screen. The colors of the corals were now flashing lights that pulsed in time with the music. Where had the music come from? He hadn’t been playing any. But now it seemed to fill the room.

“I need to create,” he said, suddenly overtaken with purpose.

“Yes, Ollie. Let it flow through you,” Kris encouraged him.

He headed back to his workbench and started sketching what he was seeing. The colors. The music. Everything that seemed to flow together in a way that seemed so natural even if he could never have imagined it before.

He pulled up his project and forked it. He was now inspired to rework the entire animation from scratch. Hours passed as he worked feverishly, unable to think of anything else. He couldn’t feel hunger, or exhaustion. Every ounce of his being was pulled into the colors and music now flooding his head.

Finally, he leaned back. He could feel the drug’s effect beginning to wear off. The room was no longer shimmering, and the colors were fading away. Still, his animation was complete. He played it back. It was raw and alive, unlike anything he’d ever made before.

He turned towards Kris on the couch and saw she had left. When had she done that? He didn’t even hear her. He felt a bit lonely all of a sudden. She had been his only companion, and he knew that he needed to see her again to get a second dose.

The next week turned into a blur. He barely slept or ate, consumed by the pills that Kris sold to him. He could barely wake up every morning to jog along the waterfront as his mind could still feel the aftershocks of synesthesia. Then he decided on Sunday not to take it. He had dinner with his parents that night and he didn’t want to feel exposed around them.

While his dad was no longer the governor, the family mansion looked even grander than the state-owned one. Their dining room had a large table made from reclaimed driftwood, imported from Spain and crafted by artisans. The cutlery was sterling silver, and the plates were hand-painted porcelain.

“So Oliver, your mother tells me you’re working on something new,” his father began, sipping a glass of vintage wine. “We saw a preview online. Very... colorful.”

Oliver swallowed nervously. He could feel the wine burning in his throat. “Yes father, I’ve been experimenting with some new techniques.”

“It really is impressive,” his mother chimed in, more complimentary. “Though it looks like you haven’t been sleeping much. Are you sure you’re taking care of yourself?”

“I just have had a few creative bursts,” he managed, holding back a yawn. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Speaking of which, I’ve been hearing some troubling rumors,” his father set down his glass. “There are whispers of a new potent substance being passed around in artistic circles. Something that supposedly enhances creativity. Do you know anything about that?”

“What kind of substance, father?” Oliver asked, trying to stay nonchalantly. Underneath the tablecloth, his knees were shaking. He moved his hands away from his plate to keep his legs steady.

“Some kind of pill, I hear it’s called ‘Myuze’,” his tone turned serious. “Several people have wound up in the hospital after taking it because it caused severe neurological side effects. They have developed debilitating dependencies, and some have even suffered permanent brain damage. Frankly, this seems like an even more dangerous psychedelic than the ones of my youth.”

“I... I don’t know anything about that, father,” Oliver lied, trying to keep his voice steady.

“I know you wouldn’t. I’ve been speaking with the current administration. I think there’s going to be a comprehensive crackdown on this stuff soon. We need to balance freedom with the common good and public safety.”

The word “crackdown” sent a chill down Oliver’s spine. He had no intention of giving up the pills. His father’s stance was now a direct threat to his creative process. He felt trapped in the walls of the mansion. He wanted to scream and run away, but the words were stuck in his throat.

“I do hope they catch whoever is distributing that stuff,” his mom added, now concerned. She looked over at Oliver and he could feel her gaze penetrating him. “You seem a little flushed, dear. Are you feeling alright?”

“Just a long day,” Oliver forced a smile. “Maybe I need to head home soon and get some rest.”

The lie felt heavy on his tongue. He didn’t want to lie to his parents, but he knew they could never know the truth. It was a secret he had to keep between himself and Kris.

The summer solstice coincided with the Mollywood Awards Gala. The venue was a repurposed vertical farm that was now a stunning event space. Towering walls of green plants snaked up the walls and there was a large waterfall that cascaded over an assortment of lights and holographic displays. Even if Oliver hadn’t taken Myuze that day, he could’ve felt the energy in the air.

He sat at a prominent table near the front, nervously sipping a glass of champagne between his parents. They didn’t know he was under the influence of the drug, and it was hard for him to pretend that he wasn’t seeing vivid sensations everywhere he looked.

His latest animation, submitted to the committee for consideration, was “Hydraulic Rainbow” which explored the concept of Miami as an underwater paradise with mermaids and dancing corals. The city parks were now breathing lungs. The streets were now pulsing veins of colorful light. It was a bold vision, and people who saw it all came away impressed.

“...And the winner for Best Debut Animation is... Oliver Barron for ‘Hydraulic Rainbow’!” the announcer’s voice boomed through the hall.

Thunderous applause erupted, catching Oliver off-guard. His parents had already risen to their feet.

“Go on, Ollie,” Kris urged.

Oliver stepped forward as his heart pounded, which in turn caused a kaleidoscope of colors to burst forth in his vision. There were so many colors he couldn’t even see his feet. He struggled to make it to the stage, and then climb up the three steps to the podium.

“Thank you,” he began, holding the microphone tightly in his grip. He looked out at the crowd, expecting to see smiling faces. Instead, the pill was causing them to look like grotesque creatures with razor-sharp teeth. He quickly averted his gaze and felt a wave of nausea.

“This is an honor,” he continued, trying to keep his eyes down. “My animation was an attempt to explore how we are all interconnected in our great city, humans and nature alike...” he paused to search for the right words. “This is just the start of my artistic vision. I want to thank my mentor Kris, and my family. This award means so much to me and all the upstart artists in Mollywood trying to create true art unburdened by limitations.”

He quickly stepped down from the stage. The trophy he had been handed felt heavy and biting cold, like a chunk of ice. He just wanted to get back to his seat as fast as he could. However, each step now felt more difficult. The floor seemed to be rippling like water, and his legs dragged across the carpet like they were out of sync with his head.

As he reached the table, he placed the trophy down and slumped into his chair. He quickly started to rub his hands together to warm them up, though they still felt numb. His parents looked at him with pride, smiling as a photographer passed by.

“I’m so proud of you,” his mother whispered.

“You really earned this,” his father added.

“Thank you,” he mumbled in response, struggling to catch his breath. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

“Ollie, can I steal you for a moment?” Kris asked, standing up.

“I don’t know, Kris,” he replied, still trying to keep the room from spinning.

“Go ahead with your friend,” his mother encouraged. “I’ll keep your father company.”

Feeling pressure from everyone, he stood up and followed Kris out of the room.

Once out in the atrium, he took a deep breath of air. He could feel the mist from the waterfall cooling his face. Although the colors were still swirling, at least he was away from the grotesque faces of the crowd.

“Congratulations, Ollie. You really deserved it,” Kris said, beaming.

“I... I feel strange,” he admitted, feeling his body begin to list to the side.

“Ollie?” she asked, concerned.

He couldn’t answer her. His mouth went dry and his vision grew blurry and dark. He saw her reaching to grab him as he collapsed into the water.

Zoey threw her body into the wrench one last time with all the energy she could muster. She felt the sound of the wrench clicking not through the vacuum but through the vibrations in her bones all the way through her EVA suit. Thankfully, her effort paid off. The bolt finally seated into the solar array. A green light appeared on the corner of her suit’s HUD, confirming the connection was active.

She put the wrench back into her toolbox and looked across the barren rim of Shackleton Crater. She could see a dull gray landscape stretching out in every direction. Her orange suit was the only pop of color in an otherwise monochromatic world. She turned back to her lunar rover and hobbled back to the driver’s seat.

Now that the array was fixed, she could start her long journey back to the habitat. The sun was low on the horizon, causing long shadows to stretch across the regolith. Her HUD showed the temperature starting to drop rapidly. Even with her suit, the battery was only rated for a few hours, and that would drain faster if she used the built-in heater.

This was her 114th night on her solitary mission. There were less than seventy left before her rotation ended. She was on the back-half now and that gave her something to look forward to, as the loneliness was hitting her harder than she ever expected. The Internet was a joke out here. Data packets took forever to load on the slow connection that serviced every habitat with one sat link. Real-time calls were impossible due to the 2.56-second round trip delay for the fastest fiber optic connections to communicate between Luna and Earth. Personal matters were shelved to low-priority queues so that mission reports and diagnostics could get through.

The only real connection she had with other people was through the local airwaves. When she turned on the rover, she tapped the console to turn on the radio.

The voice of Greg Shepherd, a warm baritone that felt like sitting down in front of a cozy fireplace with a cup of hot coffee, started to speak through the rover speakers through her helmet’s local comms system.

“Welcome back to Luna Public Radio,” Greg greeted each listener with his smooth voice. “And welcome back to this edition of ‘All Things Considered’. If you’re just joining in, I am your host, Greg Shepherd. We are leaving the pressurized habitats and traveling about a century back in time, and about 384,000 kilometers away. Our story starts in a small workshop in rural Vermont, where a man named Willy Poole still practices the art of handcrafting guitars from wood, not pulp printers.”

Zoey could hear the crisp rhythmic sound of a hand plane as it cut into wood. She put the car onto autopilot and closed her eyes. The sound was so real she could almost smell the sawdust falling to the ground in the workshop. She thought back to her own grandfather’s garage and all his weekend woodworking projects.

“When Willy plays one of his guitars, you can hear the forest it came from,” Greg continued over the background sounds of the woodworking. “You can hear the light creak of the wood bending. You can hear the wood breathing as a light whisper. He says every guitar has its own origin story that needs to be told.”

There was a single plucked guitar string, a deep C-note that dug an earworm into her head. She could think back to her childhood when she lay in the grass and soaked up the warm sunlight on her face. The sound of the guitar felt alive, a field of life and growth. Meanwhile, the rover kept moving across the empty lunar landscape.

The end of the segment came with a final small acoustic instrumental that caused her to let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“A remarkable story,” Greg continued. “It speaks to a deeper need for connecting with the world around us. And I’m joined by my next guest, Amber Porter, the Executive Director of Off-World Broadcasting for NPR. Amber, welcome to the show.”

“Thank you, Greg. I agree that was a beautiful story,” her voice had a banal tone of a corporate executive. Zoey could tell that Amber was forcing enthusiasm. “You’re right that these stories do more than just entertain our lunar colonists. They are a lifeline. We’ve seen our narrative programs have led to a significant decrease in reports of isolation stress. We are committed to providing more content like this, as our mission is to connect our listeners back to our shared humanity.”

“That’s why I joined this service,” Greg added. “I recognized that even so far from Earth we still need ways to feel connected.”

“Yes, and given the Internet struggles we have here, our local radio network is the best way to do that. We have a lot of exciting programming in the works.”

“And you’re here to talk about another exciting announcement, aren’t you, Amber?” Greg asked.

“Yes. We are greenlighting a new program called Sol Public Radio as a new network of radio stations we will be placing in tandem with local colonies across the solar system. We will be broadcasting on Mars, the asteroid belt, and even Europa. We want to make sure that you feel connected to the rest of humanity no matter where you are.”

“I know our listeners will be thrilled to hear that,” Greg replied. “I’m sure we’ll look forward to hearing more about that in the coming months too.”

“I always feel proud to be a part of this mission, and I hope we can continue to do this for many years to come,” Amber said.

Zoey could now see the habitat rising on the horizon. She turned off the radio and turned her attention back to the rover’s controls. She had to agree with Amber. As humanity spread across the solar system, the biggest challenge they would be facing was how to stay connected. Other things like power and logistics were solvable, but the ability to spread a story across the vacuum of space felt far more valuable to keep her upbeat and looking forward to the next day.

The town hall had ended and everyone went in their separate directions. Now, as the sun was beginning to set, Mayor Futi sat at the front of a long table in a much smaller and more humble.

She could feel the weight of this decision. She had to represent her people, but also understood that she represented a global symbol and that the world’s attention was on her.

Also at the table was Lakpa, Rohan, and five other council members made up of community elders and lodge owners. A young secretary placed cups of butter tea in front of each seat.

“The arguments have been made. Everyone spoke very passionately,” Futi began, her gaze sweeping the room. “This is not a decision to be taken lightly, but we must decide.”

Dorje spoke up first. He owned one of the largest lodges in Gorakshep.

“Sir Rothschild has brought a lot of complaints, and he is very influential. Many of my guests watch his videos. If they follow through on their vow to boycott Nepal… I would hate to let all my staff go, so this is a big risk.”

Another council member nodded to what he was saying. “Zennifer has a large social media presence among the same people who come here for tourism. There have been a drop in bookings for fewer reasons. We’ve seen a lot of negative comments already. I mean, we have to acknowledge their tourism dollars fund our schools and clinics as long as we preserve their vision of Everest.”

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Liz chewed on her tablet’s stylus as she monitored the molecular construction behind a glass screen. The lab had no smell. That was intentional. Everything was focused on the molecules being organized in front of her.

On the other side of the window was a small triangular chip. It was simple, almost embarrassingly so. The only thing that distinguished it from the ones found in every grocery store was a powdery coating of a color somewhere between rust-red and gold. It was her masterpiece, the culmination of a year of hard work.

The lab door let out of a pneumatic hiss as it opened, breaking off her focus. Martin strode in wearing an expensive tailored suit that felt out of place in this sterile environment. In his hands were a small black can of “Momentum”, a failed line of hyper-caffeinated cheese puffs which couldn’t even get through small-scale market testing. He had managed to get the remaining inventory and was living off them.

He stood behind her and stared at her monitor, which displayed a pulsing red brain.

“Liz, are you still chasing your ‘white whale’?” he asked impatiently. “The numbers look good. They’ve looked good for a week.”

“The bliss point is stable, but the hedonic decay is still too rapid,” she replied. “It does induce a craving, but it’s short-lived. It plateaus.”

“A feedback loop is what we want though,” he took a bite, apathetic to the dust falling on the pristine floor. “The entire country is on these GLP-1 gummies. Old-school snacks don’t cut it anymore. We need something that can get through the door and into their bedroom. We need something that can override their biochemical willpower. And we already have that.”

“But...”

He peered through the window at the chip laying there.

“We don’t need it to taste good. This isn’t food science. We’re doing counter-pharmacology. You’ve weaponized the trigeminal nerve for us.”

Liz felt a tightness in her stomach, the same tightness she had as a child as she remembered the insulin her father would regularly inject. She had come to America to escape the rigidness of French gastronomy, to be able to experiment freely. Somehow she found herself trying to pick the consumer’s lock for a man who just wanted to take their money.

“The long-term effect on consumer neurology is still unclear,” she countered.

“The long-term effect on our stock price is clear though. We can’t keep selling the same old snacks. We need this to be packaged and launched very soon,” he replied, mixing sarcasm and seriousness. “The board is meeting on Friday. I need the formulation by then.”

He turned and marched out of the lab as quickly as he entered. The only remnant were the dusty fingerprints he managed to leave everywhere. Liz continue to stare at her chip, as it was the epitome of her work. It was a far cry from her grandmother’s patisserie in Lyon, where the air was thick with the scents of butter and caramelized sugar. There, food was a matter of joy. It wasn’t part of a corporate battle against discerning consumers.

When she returned home that evening, her meal of microwaved pizza rolls was interrupted by a sharp rap at the door. She got off the couch and waddled over to the door. She opened it slowly.

“Liz!”

Elodie dropped her bags, which were all bright and full of stickers. She threw her arms around her cousin.

Liz hugged back carefully, surprised to see her cousin here at her apartment. She could smell perfume assailing her nostrils. It felt alien.

“Elodie, I thought you were coming next week,” Liz replied as she felt a genuine smile creep up on her face.

Elodie was a decade younger, and had an earnest curiosity about the world that America would either satisfy or crush.

“My schedule moved around,” she shrugged, pushing the bags into the small apartment. “This city is so amazing. It’s so big. And so loud.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Only a snack on the plane.”

“Let me see if I can throw something together. I still remember some of grandma’s recipes.”

Liz strolled into the kitchen and started to throw together a French dinner using whatever American ingredients she had. Elodie looked around the apartment and inspected the fridge with a rare curiosity.

“What’s this?” she asked, lifting a carton of oat milk.

“Milk,” Liz answered before clarifying. “From oats.”

“Why?”

“Dairy is considered inflammatory by most wellness metrics.”

Elodie frowned and put back the carton. She pulled open the crisper and grabbed a rich red tomato. She closed her eyes and took a deep inhale as she brought it to her nose.

“Oh. It looks like a perfect tomato, but it only smells like an okay one,” she said, still beaming. “At the market near home, you can smell the tomatoes from a few stalls away. Old Jean-Pierre will yell at you if you don’t smell them first before buying.”

Liz watched her cousin gush over her food with some remorse. In France, GLP-1s were still a highly controlled substance. It was rare that someone would take them, and they definitely didn’t sell gummies. There, people still ate normal food. They still had appetites. They didn’t have to be fed a bunch of hyper-engineered chemicals. Elodie was naïve to all this.

Liz felt a heavy weight on her shoulders. The board meeting was inching closer each day. She reviewed the final cytotoxicity reports. Every test reported green. Technically it was safe for human consumption. She decided to take her prototype bag home with her to run through some final analyses outside of the confines of the lab. She placed it carefully on the center of her coffee table.

Elodie was busy dancing in the living room with headphones over her ears. She was holding up scarves and was trying to decide which one to wear.

“Liz, I need your help. Which one of these would make me look more distinguished in art museums?”

Liz swiveled her chair around. “Forget about scarves for a moment. Let me show you what I work on.”

She walked over to the coffee table and lifted the foil bag.

“This is my latest creation.”

Elodie’s eyes lit up with interest. “You made these? It looks so official!”

“We are very official,” Liz felt a growing pride. “We do more than just making some snacks. We design the palette, but also the brain’s response to the palette. What I’ve created in that bag is the richest flavor profile that has ever been created.”

Liz grabbed each side of the bag and pulled them apart. The bag let out a soft crinkle as it tore open. A deep, pleasant aroma filled the room. It was stronger than Elodie’s perfume. She reached into the bag and pulled out a single triangle.

“This chip does far more than stimulate your taste buds,” Liz explained as she handed the chip over to her cousin. “The chemicals are manufactured to stimulate your trigeminal nerve directly. It creates a sensation of tastes that aren’t real but feel real. We stack these bliss points to create a cascade of dopamine powerful enough to cut through their GLP-1 buffer.”

Elodie furrowed her brow. “A GLP-1 buffer? You mean a filter?”

“Yes, it’s a chemical filter which Americans take to dull their appetite. You don’t have one of those. You’ll be tasting this without any limitations. Haute-résolution.”

Elodie took the chip and placed it on her tongue. As was her habit, she closed her eyes and tried to savor the taste.

Instead her eyes flew open and she let out a sharp gasp. Her face turned a deep pink and she leaned forward. She placed a hand on Liz’s shoulder to brace herself.

“Mon Dieu,” she whispered, sounding as if she was out of breath.

Her whole body seemed to be pulsing with shock.

“Elodie, was it too much?” Liz grew concerned.

Elodie lunged forward before Liz could react. She snatched the bug and hastily pulled the bag open wider.

“Elodie, that’s the prototype, you...”

But Elodie wasn’t listening. She tilted her head back and poured the contents of the bag straight into her mouth. She chewed with a manic energy. Her loud crunches filled Liz’s ears. The rust-gold powder dusted her clothing. She didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. Once the bag was empty, it fell out of her hands. She took long, deep breaths. Her eyes remained wide.

Then a slow smile spread across her face. It was a vacant smile. It was voracious.

The plans for the art museum had been discarded. Elodie woke up late the next morning and had an intense headache. Liz cautiously handed over an Advil and a glass of water.

Elodie had lost her joie de vivre. Instead there was a sullen lethargy. She pushed away the fresh, ripe strawberries on her plate that Liz had prepared for breakfast.

“Are you sick?” Liz’s concern was growing.

“I’m fine,” she mumbled, her eyes darting around the kitchen nervously. “Just... do you have more of those chips?”

“I just had a prototype. One bag.”

“Oh,” her face dropped with an overzealous disappointment. “Can we go to the store?”

“It’s not in stores yet. It’s still a secret.”

Elodie stopped talking and poked at her strawberries, but didn’t eat anything. Later, she asked again. After lunch, she asked again. As the day went on, her curiosity had focused into a single-minded obsession. She kept pacing around the apartment, unable to sit still or converse with anything more than monosyllabic answers.

When Liz woke up the next morning, she heard something stirring from the kitchen. She worried it was another mouse. She grabbed a broom from the closet and slowly tip-toed into the room. There, she found Elodie frantically throwing trash out onto the floor as her entire body shook anxiously.

“Elodie, what are you doing?”

Elodie leaped backwards, clutching the empty crumped bag in her hands like it was a rare jewel.

“I just wanted to appreciate the design,” she stammered.

“You’re shaking,” Liz whispered. “You’re irritable. Anxious. Compulsive.”

She realized these were all the symptoms of addiction withdrawal.

“I feel sick,” Elodie moaned. “My head hurts. Everything I eat tastes... gray. Blah. All I can imagine is the taste of those chips.”

She looked up at Liz. There was a disturbing desperation on her face. She had an unsatiable hunger. “I need one,” she pleaded.

The brain scans were no longer abstract. Liz could see the data playing out in front of her, consuming her cousin from the inside. Her reward pathways, lacking the buffer, had been metaphorically carpet bombed by an overwhelmingly addictive molecule. She had poisoned her cousin.

A sharp fever overtook Elodie by evening. She lay on the couch shivering even under a pile of blankets. She was barely conscious, shifting around endlessly and muttering nonsensical phrases in French. Liz checked every few minutes. Her skin remained pale and her temperature remained high.

“I feel so hungry,” she murmured in French. Her voice sounded as pale as her skin. “A hunger throughout my entire body. I keep hearing the crunch. I keep thinking of the taste. Make it stop.”

Liz had shed her scientific perspective a while ago and was now in a deep panic. She had to take her cousin to the hospital. She unfolded her phone and ordered a rideshare.

Arriving, they were stuck in the waiting room for a while. Liz could see others who appeared to be casualties of the snack wars. She saw a teenager sitting in a corner with his eyes transfixed on the floral wallpaper. A small stream of saliva dripped from his mouth. The place made her uncomfortable.

They were soon called back to a sterile white room. Liz took Elodie’s hand and had to drag her down the narrow hallway. She looked close to passing out. When they got into the room, Elodie slumped down in a chair next to a man whose nametag read Dr. Benning.

He gave them a tired smile as they entered. Liz noticed how bloodshot his eyes were. They were clearly far from his first patients of the day.

“Looks like you got a bad souvenir,” he tried to joke, but his delivery sounded flat.

He grabbed a neural scanner and passed it over her head. It whirred softly as it examined her neural activity in a passive, low-resolution dataset showing up on a nearby monitor. Liz watched as Elodie’s brain appeared sector-by-sector. She saw large red spikes appearing in the nucleus accumbens. The fluctuations were chaotic.

“I don’t see any existing GLP-1s in your scans. I’m guessing you’ve just arrived them? From France, I suppose?”

“How did you know that?” Liz murmured.

“There’s specific signatures we notice among the Unbuffered,” he turned the monitor so she could see it better. “You can see her reward pathways have been completely overwhelmed. It’s a sort of acute sensory overload. We’ve been developing a term for this: flavor-shot.”

Elodie’s head leaned back and stared at a small water stain on the ceiling.

“What did she eat?” he inquired.

“A new product... my company has been developing it,” Liz answered nervously.

“Normal food cravings are an instinctual communication between your stomach, your brain, and your hormones. With the GLP-1 buffer, there’s a bit of a mediator which helps with these negotiations. That is helpful for some people. But your cousin here didn’t have any mediation. The product she ate was way too strong that her body had no chance to fight against it.”

“So she can’t handle it?”

“Her brain has been hijacked.”

“Can you do anything about it?”

Dr. Benning pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a soft sigh.

“We can’t do brain surgery here,” he said slowly. “But we can try to treat her symptoms until her brain is able to adjust.”

He tapped something on a keyboard and suddenly Liz received an alert on her phone. There was a prescription for GLP-1 chewables. Elodie would have to take one every morning. Liz had managed to engineer a potent poison to break through the GLP-1 buffer, but now it was the only antidote to save her cousin.

Friday morning, Liz walked into the corporate boardroom to present her report. Elodie was busy sleeping. The chewable she had taken the night before seemed to be holding her cravings at bay, with the understanding that she was now just another medicated civilian in a brave new world of hyper-addictive snacks.

“Liz, welcome back to the office,” Carvallo started as he started presenting his slidedeck to a large monitor. The rest of the board members looked eagerly at the screen.

“Dr. Blanc, I believe you’re going to be presenting about our next product which will be released in Q3. Give us the final metrics and formulation.”

Liz walked up to the podium and tapped her phone against it. Immediately the presentation control transitioned to her phone, where she was able to load up the slides she had spent all of last night working on.

The first slide was an anonymized medical file titled “Patient X. Female. Age 19. Diagnosis: Actue Sensory Overload.”

She presented the first brain scan, one taken months ago, and the more recent one taken just a day before. She told the board about the vital signs, Dr. Benning’s diagnosis, and the necessary prescription.

“Our next chip product is one hundred percent effective in giving unbuffered consumers actue neurological distress,” she told them. “The feedback loop becomes so powerful the only known medical treatment is a high-dose of GLP-1 agonists that we are trying to circumvent. It’s an endless arms race.”

The room was silent. Carvallo’s professional smile had turned.

“This product does not give us consumers. We get casualties. Our chip is too dangerous to release to the public. The only thing I can recommend is terminating it immediately and classifying all our research as a biohazard.”

Carvallo stood up slowly, eyeing her with contempt. “What you call a casualty is no more than a proof of concept,” he said, his voice quivering with barely-restrained anger.

He turned to the board.

“This product, as you can see, exceeds our expectations. Her anecdote is just for a single person. A tourist. Our market is for the vast, overwhelming majority who are already buffered. It’s nothing to worry about.”

He turned back to Liz.

“You’re fired, by the way. Security will come around soon to escort you out. And think carefully about what you are going to do next. Your work visa is sponsored by us. If you try to transfer it, and that company comes to us for a reference...”

Liz stood stoically and listened to him. He didn’t know that she had already encrypted the entire project folder, including the formulations and research findings. She had already sent the data to the FDA as a whistleblower. Even if she were to leave the company right now, and never turn back, the damage had already been done.

The Friday after, Elodie and Liz navigated through the busy airport to get to her gate. The corridors were full of chatter in a dozen different languages. Everyone had somewhere to be, and that included her cousin. Elodie was looking much better now. The color had returned to her cheeks. Still, there was a certain look in her eyes, she was no longer an innocent tourist. She learned how harsh the world could be.

“Call me when you land?” Liz asked as they paused outside of the security line.

“Of course,” Elodie gave a soft, weak smile.

They stood there for a moment. Liz thought she could say something more, but she didn’t know what. She had harmed her cousin in ways she might never be able to comprehend, and how could you try to make up for that? She reached into her bag and pulled out a prescription bottle, recently refilled.

“For the flight,” she said, pressing it into Elodie’s open hand. “Just in case.”

Elodie nodded and turned. She would return home soon, but her world would never be the same.

Louis leaned back on the couch and rested his head in the corner of the sofa, sprawled out with the mental exhaustion from a long day of meetings in virtual reality. He scratched idly at his head and felt a sharp pain through his scalp.

A small scratch on his head came from his Digit-X, the prosthetic that was now his middle finger. It was a strong combination of carbon fiber and synthetic dermis, but he still didn’t have the right calibration with it, and sometimes it used more pressure than he intended.

He winced and rubbed his head with his other hand. As he brought it away, he saw a speck of blood on his finger. He sighed and rubbed it again. The scratch definitely hurt, but the real pain was from the cost he had to pay. It was more expensive than the Honda Civic he’d been trying to fix when he lost the original.

Rosa sat on the other end of the couch, curled up under a mountain of blankets. She stared at the screen on the wall, which was playing a romantic drama with a lot of crying and kissing. She wasn’t paying attention to him, but Louis could tell she still resented him. Three months before, on the side of a snowy highway in the Rockies, Louis had picked hubris rather than gloves.

“It’s freezing in here. There’s basically no insulation in here,” Rosa complained and she pulled the blankets further up her body.

“The laws of thermodynamics can be cruel,” Louis joked, testing the waters.

“So is frostbite,” Rosa shot back without looking away from the TV.

Louis looked down at his Digit-X, which was glowing a passive standby blue around where his knuckle used to be. He didn’t think he could apologize again. There was nothing more he could say that would satisfy her. Instead, he had to take a more direct approach.

Louis sent a mental command to the prosthetic, activating the built-in warming element. The LED ring turned into a soft amber as the device temperature climbed to 104°F, just above a nominal temperature. Although the feature was meant to keep the servo-actuators from freezing in the cold, he had a different use in mind.

“Come here,” Louis offered, lifting himself up from the corner. He moved over towards her and draped his left arm around the back of the sofa so that his hand rested on her shoulder.

“I’m not in the mood for this,” she said in a flat tone as her body turned stiff and tense. She still didn’t forgive him for his recklessness, and the touch of the prosthetic was a physical reminder of how he didn’t listen to her.

But as his warm finger pressed against a tension knot in her shoulder, pushing through the thick wool of her sweater, she let out a small gasp. She still refused to look at him.

Louis felt her shoulders relax again and decided to take a step further. He mentally activated the haptic feedback system at a low 30-hertz buzz. There was a faint low hum from the prosthetic, almost like a cat purring.

“Is your finger vibrating?” Rosa’s eyes were wide and she turned her head slightly to look at him.

“It’s just a system diagnostic,” Louis lied, trying to downplay the situation. “It’s just a routine check that the servos are still functioning. Do you want me to turn it off?”

“No, it’s fine,” Rosa said, almost too quickly.

He pressed his hand closer to her shoulder as his finger inched closer to the back of her neck. The synthetic skin reformed and took on a softer texture, like it was made of velvet.

Rosa let out a loud breath and her neck fell back against the sofa cushions and against his hand. Her hand flailed down on the couch cushions for the remote and paused her movie. She was starting to relax in a way she hadn’t felt in months.

With the movie paused, they could hear the soft patters of raindrops hitting the windows. She turned to look at him with a mix of affection and annoyance, but her eyes were softer now as she had been before.

“You’re such an idiot,” she said with a small smile. “If you had listened to me, you wouldn’t have lost that finger.”

“You’re right,” he admitted.

“But...” Rosa let out another sigh. She reached over and took his other hand. She ran her thumb over his human fingers. “I can’t necessarily forgive you, but there has been a small upgrade I think.”

“My goal is to make your life better, or at least more pleasurable,” Louis said smoothly.

“You’ve definitely managed to do that,” she murmured. “But don’t let it get to your head. I’m still mad at you.”

“Anything I can do to make it up to you?”

“Let’s go to the bedroom and you can give me a longer walk-through of all your new features,” Rosa looked at him with fire in her eyes. Her cold front had finally melted.

Sir Alistair Rothschild, Zennifer, and a stern-faced representative from a climbing tour group sat in the front row of the community hall in Namche Bazaar. On the other side of the hall, Anija Sherpa, Lakpa, and Rohan also sat in the front row.

The entire hall was packed. In addition to these speakers, there were villagers, lodge owners, students, and foreign climbers who filled each seat and even more stood by the back wall. The air was thick with tension as the meeting was called to order.

The town’s mayor struck a small brass bell.

“Today, we’ve gathered to discuss once more the proposed Sagarmatha observatory,” she said slowly and neutrally. “Since the last time we held one of these, there has been… a large amount of attention on this project. So we will present these arguments and we will do this calmly. First, Sir Rothschild and friends please come up. The microphone is yours.”

Sir Alistair walked up to the podium and took the microphone. When he looked out at the crowd, his face was somber. It looked like he was about to cry.

“Esteemed elders, community members, friends of Everest. Thank you for coming here today to listen to me.

“For over a century, this place has been where men and women from around the world have come. They came seeking challenge, solace, and a connection to the mountain. Whether you call it Everest, Chomolungma, or something else, it is a symbol of the grandeur of nature.”

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New Orleans was a city at a crossroads. For much of the public, the city represented history integrated with nature. Ornate iron balconies looked over streets and canals where the community traveled back and forth. They were resourceful, constructing algae lamps and solar-sail skiffs to adapt to the changing climate among the gulf. Despite these changes, the residents were always nervous as the storm season began.

For a small section of the public, the privileged few, they were occupied with a new, terrifying innovation: The Disaster Delta Derivatives market. The D3 was a decentralized blockchain network hosted in international waters to host bets on the precise outcomes of climate events. They could short a levee's integrity, go long on a storm surge height, or gamble on the number of displaced residents.

The leaders of this network were a crew of crypto-anarchists and free-market zealots, who believed this represented the ultimate expression of predictive power. Some even believed it could be positive for disaster relief, that it could provide greater information to first responders where there was the most need. Yet all of them enjoyed the vast wealth they would be able to accumulate from the suffering of others.

Though most didn't participate in these markets, many paid attention to them. This included Leila Hadid, a journalist working at the Pelican Post. In actuality she was sitting in Armstrong Park with a mess of windows on her laptop including message boards, currency exchanges, and weather projection models. Gordon was a large storm, a hurricane at Category 3 and rapidly strengthening.

"Look at this," she muttered, more to herself than to the duck watching her hungrily.

She highlighted a thread on OracleJazz, one of the more popular D3 discussion forums:

Shorting FQ's pump stations. Bergeron's budget cuts have left them with just prayers and decade-old firmware. Easy pickings.

Below it was another post:

Anyone else feel like Gordon is going to be the *BIG ONE*? Goign all in on a Cat 5 landfall + mass evac failure. To the moon, right? Else the bottom of the gulf.

Leila felt her chest grow tight. It was more than just the callousness and the gleeful speculation on misery. She worried this new market could incentivize the worst in people or even reward those who had the power to ensure the worst. Although the blockchain was meant to bring transparency in transactions, anonymity protocols and tumblers kept finances in a murky swamp.

Her current investigation into the D3 phenomenon, the wild new frontier of disaster capitalism, had been taking a turn for the worst due to the sheer volume of pessimistic bets against New Orleans where she was.

Then, a ping. The governor was just beginning a live broadcast. The video feed began with him sitting in the cool grandeur of the Governor's Mansion. Hughes Bergeron adjusted his silk tie against a backdrop of mahogany wood panels. He flashed his signature folksy grin towards the camera.

"My fellow Louisianans, I'm here live to talk to you about Hurricane Gordon. No doubt it is a serious storm, but let me assure you that the state is prepared. We've bolstered our coastal defenses. Our first responders, our heroic neighbors, are the best in the nation. We've worked hard to ensure evacuations will proceed safely and orderly. We believe in the strength and resilience of our people, and trust you can make the best choices for your families. We've learned from the past. This administration will continue to advocate for fiscal responsibility and efficient action. Together, we will weather this storm."

The Governor sat in his private study with a paperback in his hands. It was part of his grand collection. Though most preferred the eInk tablets, he enjoyed the status obtained from demonstrating his vast assortment of acquired works.

"Moreau, do you have those calculations?" he asked, looking up at his assistant.

The sharp-featured man nodded and brought only a sleek gray tablet. The Governor took it and navigated its complex interface with expertise. It wasn't StormStake directly, but a series of nested accounts within a private wealth management platform that specialized in discreet digital assets.

Bergeron authorized a significant transfer of Ethereum Classic into a high-risk, high-yield derivative pool on D3. The wager was very specific: catastrophic failure of three designated pumping stations in the Garden District, a storm surge of twelve feet or more in the French Quarter, and a city-wide power outage that lasted over 72 hours. If the bets won, it would have an astronomical payoff. They also mirrored, with uncanny precision, the areas that saw cuts in the maintenance budget.

"A bold move, Governor," Moreau raised an eyebrow. "The premiums on that specific set of outcomes are substantial."

"Fortune favors the bold," Bergeron had a thin smile growing on his lips. "And the well-informed. It's just a matter of market dynamics, hedging against the inevitable. Besides, a market correction is exactly what a bloated system needs."

In the ensuing days Leila worked overtime to study the volume of D3 bets and helping her readers prepare for the storm. Beyond the sheer number of bets, there were a number of highly specific, pessimistic wagers. They were not betting on broad damage from a hurricane, the bets were on specific points of failure like they were just checking off a list.

"It's more than just cynical opportunism," she remarked to her editor, a gruff elderly journalist named Greg. "Some of these high-stake bets on infrastructure align too perfectly with the projects whose funding has dried up or are stuck in red tape."

"That's the governor's fiscal responsibility? Cutting essential services while preaching self-reliance? That's the standard playbook. Nothing new under the sun, right? Doesn't mean he's causing it just to make a buck."

"Yes, I remember. Nothing new under the sun," she conceded.

She was only paying half-attention as she scrolled through city budget amendments and watched transaction graphs moving up and down every minute. "It's circumstantial, but the timing of some bets seem to coincide with maintenance contracts getting deferred. It's like someone knew the chair was about to be pulled out from under us."

Although Greg encouraged her to focus more on the immediacy of the storm, she couldn't shake this bad feeling in her gut. At his urging, she was told to reach out to Marky Dubois.

As she reached the low-lying district of Gentilly Terraces, she saw activity buzzing all around the local community center.

"Mark?" she called out.

"Marky," said a tall, slim boy as he placed a box of supplies down on the ground. "You are Leela?"

"Leila," she clarified. "I'm with the Post, doing a piece on community resilience."

"We're buckling down for this storm. Our local co-op has been working on supporting our people. Check out those solar panels on the roof. We've got a full microgrid installed. Even if the governor fails us, we can still keep the lights on."

"The governor was on the radio this morning," remarked a young woman, one of Marky's lieutenants. "Talked a lot about targeted action, but we haven't seen a state engineer down here in months."

"We've learned to figure things out on our own," Marky continued. "We can't rely on the state to keep us safe."

"It seems like a lot of work," Leila remarked, looking around at all the volunteers.

"It takes a village," Marky chuckled. "Not all of us are great at everything, but we all have a place. Look at the gardens planted along the streets. Bioswales. They should be able to suck up a lot of the storm surge. I don't have a green thumb, but a few of us do. And we've got a tidal generator in the local canal. Experimental, sure, but we'll get some good data in a few days."

"Doesn't that fit into the governor's narrative around self-reliance?"

"Look, we do need to be prepared for ourselves, but it doesn't absolve him of his responsibility to maintain the systems we depend on."

"It's a partnership between communities and the state," the woman commented.

"It's supposed to be," Marky added. "But his 'targeted action' feels a lot closer to 'targeted neglect'."

He had the same unease that she did, but with a confidence that she didn't share. Marky looked up at the sky, already turning a foreboding purple.

She jotted down notes on the conversation. He didn't know his observations of local failures would soon become a key background for her digital forensics.

Leila decided to focus on the D3 bets against the 17th Street Canal's aging floodwalls. They had been flagged a year ago by the Army Corps of Engineers for urgent upgrades, but the governor had "indefinitely postponed" them because of budget overruns elsewhere. The wagers were complex and highly leveraged, based on new wallets using Ethereum Classic and obfuscated through a tumbler.

She knew trying to trace the wallets directly was a fool's errand. Mixers like EctoPlasma were designed to sever any links between the sender and receiver by pooling transactions and distributing them randomly. But no system was infallible.

"They rely on volume and time distortion," she talked to herself as she began pulling the contracts into a CSV file. "But if the deposits and withdrawals are significant enough, you can correlate them with off-chain data and find signals from the noise."

With the vast volume of bets, she thought it best to focus exclusively on the floodwalls. She cross-referenced the withdrawal patterns from EctoPlasma with new wallets activated on various exchanges which were known for lax Know-Your-Custom and Anti-Money Laundering protocols. Many of them were situated out of the gulf on floating data centers. Days of this intense, painstaking work yielded little more than eye strain and a growing pile of discarded energy drink cans.

Then, something.

A series of withdrawals from EctoPlasma were not sent to a tumbler or an exchange, but a single new wallet which purchased a non-fungible token. It was for a piece of digital art sold at auction for an unfathomable price. The gallery was a quiet favorite of the governor's wife.

This wasn't a smoking gun, but the revelation still made her breath stop. The NFT could've been purchased by anyone. She didn't know who owned the wallet. The timing could've been a coincidence. But it was a small piece of evidence, a small thread she could begin pulling.

The hurricane arrived with a furious roar. The sky had turned black and unleashed winds which screamed like banshees. Buildings and streets were attacked with the deep wrath of nature. Rain didn't fall; it flew horizontally faster than a speeding bus. Streets turned into churning brown rivers in the first few minutes.

Leila worked from the community center in Gentilly Terraces. Marky and the co-op fought to keep the water out, manually pumping water from the basement. The microgrid seemed to hold, with lights flickering overhead as the city's power grid predictably collapsed in a series of explosive blue flashes. Families huddled inside, drenched.

"The pumping station in Elysian Fields just went offline," Marky yelled, watching the data trickle in from the local mesh network. "The backup generators never kicked in, just like those crypto vultures predicted."

"That doesn't make sense," Leila remarked, looking up from her laptop. "The generators were new, funded by the state. I saw the installation crews last year."

The reports had been glowing. But were they just another fiction? Intentional neglect?

She turned back to her work. She had to be quick. The backup battery was rapidly depleting and her allocated charging time wasn't until the next morning. While the solar panels held, there was more people here than supply. Power had to be rationed. And with the failure of the pump, the overflowing canals would flood additional houses. The community center would see more people seeking refuge.

Her pricey Internet connection to a satellite was tenuous, and each update of the newsfeed showed chaos and pleas for rescue. The NFT was an interesting clue, but she needed something more direct. She had to find something that tied the betting wallets not just to the Governor's circle, but to his finances.

As Gordon's eye crawled over the city, there was a brief respite. The wind dropped to mere gale and the rain softened to a torrential downpour. With the chance to recharge her batteries and a clearer connection to the satellite, Leila got back to work.

One of the larger wallets had received a significant payout from EctoPlasma, a wallet from one of the D3 whales. Days before it placed bets, this wallet had received a significant infusion of Ethereum Classic from a new, unverified wallet. This new wallet had been funded by a single transaction from a known digital asset custodian.

This custodian was used by a very specific, very private "Family Office" investment firm that Leila had investigated months ago. They managed several blind trusts established for the benefit of Governor Bergeron and his immediate family.

"Gotcha," she whispered, her word immediately droned out by a sudden gust of wind from the second half of the storm. The satellite's connection immediately wavered. "The custodian is the link. He didn't bet directly. He funded a new, anonymous wallet through his family office's custodian, then used that money for his D3 bets through EctoPlasma. Layers of obfuscation."

The 17th Street Canal floodwall chose that moment to catastrophically fail. It just surrendered with an explosion of dark, frothing water from the Gulf. This was one of the scenarios heavily bet upon by the wallet.

Leila watched a drone live-streaming the damage. It was jerky and pixelated, broadcast by an amateur storm chase for as long as possible. The stream showed water roaring into Lakeview and Mid-City, where evacuations had been slow due to "logistical issues" and a lack of available city transit. These logistical issues now felt chillingly deliberate.

The failure of the canal sent floodwater through the drainage canals, overwhelming the community center's strained defenses. Water was already seeping onto the main floor.

"We have to get to the attic," Marky yelled as he scooped up a young child. "Everyone, carefully use the emergency ladders."

Their ingenuity had bought time and likely saved lives, but they couldn't fight against a flood exacerbated by the very people sworn to prevent it.

Leila had to move too. Before shutting down her machine, she mirrored the data to an encrypted drive and to a secure cloud dropbox. The evidence wasn't quite ready for frontpage news. Not yet. It was a complex chain of financial forensics reliant on linking public data with anonymous transactions. It would be derided by the governor was circumstantial, as a politically motivated attack. With his public media inspecting the damage, anything not bulletproof would be easily dismissed.

In the silt-caked dawn that followed, Gordon had departed. The city was left in sorrow and destruction. The official response was slow, mired in the very bureaucratic inertia the governor had cultivated.

Yet where the state faltered, the people surged. Marky and the other volunteers, operating from the functional upper floors of the community center, formed a hub to serve the community. The solar cells were still working, allowing them to sterilize water. Their mesh network allowed families to reconnect and organize recovery operations on repaired electric skiffs. Supplies and medicine were shuttled back and forth through the flooded streets. They were exhausted and grieving, but kept their gritty determination.

Days later, the governor toured the most camera-friendly devastation sites with a mask of solemn concern. Flanked by FEMA officials and a fawning press corp, he pledged unwavering support and promised to rebuild stronger.

"We will allocate every necessary resource," he declared.

What was left unsaid were the untraceable crypto assets in his secret wallets whose total sum could've funded all of the city's repairs. He lauded individual responsibility and community efforts. Subtly the disaster was framed as an unfortunate act of nature rather than a crisis caused by his negligence.

Then, the Pelican Post published her finished story: Blood on the Blockchain: Governor Bergeron's Gordon Windfall?

Leila's byline was accompanied by explanations of blockchain forensics, annotated public records, and expert commentary on the disaster derivative markets. The uproar was instantaneous. As the national lens remained on Louisiana, she was immediately booked by news influencers to talk more about her reporting and the markets as a whole.

On the OracleJazz forum, some decried the "doxxing" of a successful trader, championing instead the inviolability of the blockchain and the pure information of the market.

He just made a good call

System worked as intended. Don't hate the player. Learn to play the game.

But in the streets, the reaction was fury. The idea that their suffering, their lost homes, their dead, were just a calculated variable to enrich the governor was a betrayal hard to comprehend. Protests formed across the state, covering the Governor's mansion and other state government buildings.

The governor's office issued a swift denial. "A desperate, baseless smear campaign online is trying to exploit the suffering of our state during this period of emergency. The governor's personal finances are managed ethically and transparently through a blind trust as per the law. These wild accusations of 'blockchain wizardry' are an insult to hard-working Louisianans who know better than to fall for conspiracies."

He was protected by the legal ambiguities. Even if you could prove the bets were made from his account, these betting markets were still operating in a gray zone. Could this be legally considered insider trading? Could you prove intent to defraud the populace when the bets were made on publicly observable vulnerabilities? Was it illegal to be well-informed even if that information came from your own dereliction of duty? None of that had been tested in a court.

Leila watched the fallout from her small apartment, which had become a nerve center of displaced citizen journalists trying to corroborate and expand on her findings. She should've felt proud at exposing the rot, but she still felt uneasy. The story was out. The data was public. But justice was far from certain.

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Beth held the box close against her chest, feeling the small vibrations from the rats running back and forth inside. A dozen lives, the last of her test subjects, were about to be ordained into a brave new world they had never known.

She stepped outside of the lab and down the gravel path. She could feel the crisp air of Boulder with each breath and the feel of the unsteady rocks beneath her boots. With each step, she went deeper into the trees growing wildly at the foot of the Flatirons. She could smell the pine assailing her nostrils, a welcome change from the sterile air of the lab.

She wondered what other scientists across the country were doing, if they were also leaving their labs. The FARM Act of 2028 had changed the landscape of biomedical research. Her grad school research, focused on the intricacies of organ-on-a-chip technology paired with microfluidics had finally reached its moment in the sun. When paired with new bioinformatic AI models, it meant the long-standing cruelty of animal testing had become obsolete, even banned in many cases.

The question became what to do with the specimens currently being used. The government had mandated they be decommissioned, but did not specify how. When humane euthanasia had suggested, her colleagues complied without question, but Beth balked at the idea. If they were trying to move past the cruelty of animal testing, how could she justify ending the lives of these final twelve? Didn’t they deserve a little more than that?

There was a small spot in the woods she had found a week prior. Wild plum bushes sat in a circle, in-between cottonwoods. The large slabs of the Flatirons were just beyond, staring over the clearing like giants. It was the perfect spot for a new beginning.

She knelt down in the cool, slightly damp moss and placed the box carefully down in front of her. The cardboard had managed to hold up despite the frantic pacing of the rats inside. She wondered what they must be thinking, must be feeling right now. Could they even comprehend what was happening?

She slowly peeled back the duct tape hastily placed over the flaps and opened the box. She was hit by the familiar musky odor of animal bedding and life. She knew she’d miss that smell. All twelve pairs of beady pink eyes looked up at her at the same time from the dim interior.

“This is it,” she whispered to them, realizing she was holding back tears. “I know you don’t see me as very much. Just the person who brought you food and changed your bedding. But I know you. I know all of you. You’re far more than simple specimens for us to run experiments on. Duncan, I know how you always come at your water bottle from behind. Felicity, I know how much you love to groom the others, even if they don’t like it.”

She let out a choking laugh as a tear slid down her cheek. “All of you lived a harsh life. You were born in plastic boxes, spent your life under bright fluorescent lights, and never felt the world just a few feet outside. I am so, so sorry for that. But that’s all over now. It is time for you to enjoy life.”

She tipped the box on its side, folding back the flaps to create a gentle ramp down to the grass.

“This is the last time I will see you,” she murmured, swallowing hard. “You are free now. There are no more cages or tests. It’s up to you now. Go, be happy. Live long lives and enjoy the sun on your backs.”

The rats were hesitant to leave the safety of the box. One crept up to the edge and stuck its nose out, sniffing the unfamiliar air with a twitching whisker. She couldn’t know what was most sensational to it. Was it the scent of the leaves? The wild fruits? It placed a paw on the grass slowly, as if testing the texture. Then it put down nother paw. When it looked up at the vastness of the sky, it froze.

Then, as if everything clicked into place, it darted into the grass and out of her sight.

Another followed behind. Then a third. None of them were especially brave. Their stares up at the bright sun in the sky caught them all off-guard, but they proceeded to scurry out into the grass. Beth felt proud at this final act to liberate them, as if it made up for all the years of captivity they had endured.

There was just one left inside. The runt of the litter, Duncan, who had always been withdrawn. Beth held her breath as he cautiously approached the edge. He turned her head, looking at her with small eyes and uncertain thoughts. Then as it stepped out into the grass, a shadow suddenly passed overhead.

Beth looked up, expecting to see a cloud. Instead, a red-tailed hawk had started circling with a fierce look on its face. Its wings were spread wide with a wild brilliance.

The hawk suddenly folded its wings and entered into a fast dive and stretched its sharp talons forward. If she hadn’t seen it, she would not have heard it. It was only from its sharp shriek that she even realized what was happening.

With a rush of air across her face, the feathery blur snatched Duncan from the grass with a soft thud and then immediately took off to the sky again. She heard a single squeak from her beloved rat that was cut short.

The hawk soared high into the sky with Duncan still clutched in its talons. The remaining rats had already scurried out of sight, driven away by a primal instinct that had just activated for the first time.

Beth remained on her knees, still in shock by the sudden violence that had ruined her perfect moment. She could feel the sun on her face, but it no longer had the warmth of a moment before. The wild was not going to be a gentle sanctuary for them. It would just be yet one more trial of survival with different, deadlier predators.

She grabbed the box and stood up as her vision grew blurry. Her joints ached as she looked in the now empty cardboard container. She realized her earlier speech needed a revision.

“Good luck,” she whispered, hoping they heard her.

She turned and made her way back through the trees, already unfolding the box so it could be recycled.

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Sir Alistair Rothschild began a series of video calls, connecting to a high-speed satellite dish from inside his tented dome at the Everest base camp.

“Lord Ashworth, it has been way too long,” Rothschild started, speaking in a slow, grave tone.

Ashworth was a plump man from Manchester who was a key patron of the “Global Peaks Preservation Society”.

“Alistair, I have seen some news about Everest. It seems disconcerting, to say the least. It can’t be true, can it? A massive observatory on the South Summit?”

“A monstrous observatory,” he corrected, sharing Ashworth’s indignation. “I saw the entire thing: the drilling, the heavy equipment… I’ve already gotten multiple posts going viral. They keep calling it eco-friendly, but I think we both know it’s one step towards a complete capitalist takeover of the summit.”

“Horrible. Just horrible. We can’t have one thing left untouched by greed.”

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Min Jee took a deep breath of perfume as it stuck to her skin. She looked down at the script again. The Alchemist’s Nook was the latest in the science-fiction flicks being produced by AmaCo Studios. She had been picked from hundreds for the role of Iona, the last in a future-ancient tribe of star navigators and she had to guide the hero towards his climax.

She preferred to perform in small theaters throughout the small nooks of Taipei, to explore novel characters and real-world problems. These spaces encouraged novelty. She loved to give her monologues, and sometimes wrote her own one-woman plays. The applause was a constant validation for all her hard work. But the ticket sales could hardly pay the rent.

When her profile photo had been flagged by AmaCo to come in and read a script, she thought this was her big break. Soon enough though, her dream had hit a wall.

Today, the culture of Taiwan was stuck in the eternally recycled content factory of Aria. Aria was the country’s mega-star, and despite her death seventy-or-so years ago, her essence had been captured and recreated regularly through flawless deepfakes. Every blockbuster and musical piece was labeled as ‘Aria Rediscovered’ or ‘Aria Eternal’. AmaCo had finally managed to create an infinite money printer by capitalizing on the nostalgia of a society.

The CEO, Bruno DeLeener, usually referred to it as ‘cultural preservation and celebration’. Privately, Min Jee viewed this as a ‘monopoly on creativity’.

Still, it made money. The offer was as an “analog artist” for six months. She would be a stand-in for production and then she’d be replaced by Aria in post-production. Her face, voice, and actions would be carefully recorded by cameras and motion sensors then translated to control a digital puppet.

“Min Jee, if you ask me, it’s artistic graverobbing. You’re better than that,” commented Ren, a sculptor who lived in the same housing complex as her.

“Am I?” she countered, looking over at the minimalist décor on her door. “Am I better enough to refuse a meal? Am I better enough to sleep on a bench while I try to write something new?”

There was another reason that she didn’t share, as she worried she’d be seen as naïve. She hoped that when she entered the belly of the beast she’d be able to understand how it worked and figure out a way to work around it.

Or maybe that was just some desperate justification so she could keep surviving. While the work didn’t excite her, the idea that she was entering into a contract freely was laughable when the alternative was destitution.

So she arrived at the front gates of AmaCo Studios that next Monday. It was the first time she had seen it in person. The building was massive both in surface and in the sky. The crystal tower rose so high it pierced the clouds around it. Solar panels wrapped around the tower in bunches like it was garland and flowers stuck out of small holes in the windows at various levels.

She stepped inside and took a deep whiff of the air. It smelled like synthesized jasmine. A page-bot guided her through busy hallways to the “Anya’s Legacy Studio”. She stepped inside to a room which looked less like a film set and more like a medical classroom.

Jennie Kaplan was waiting for her. This was the Jennie, the legendary director who was behind every one of the top grossing movies for the last decade. Despite her fame, she looked calm and analytical. Jennie recognized this movie was little more than a technical exercise.

“Min Jee, welcome to AmaCo,” she said, her voice precise and formal. “We’ve already reviewed your baseline data and we think you will have a good aptitude for memetic performance. Today we’ll go through some training exercises, calibrating your facial expressions and vocal timbre against Aria. Just think of it like tuning an instrument.”

Min Jee nodded even as she understood she was seen as no more than an instrument to this formidable director. She was led to a small platform in the center of the room. Around her were arrays of sensors and LEDs. Her first task was not getting into the character of Iona, the star-navigator.

Instead she had to read out lines that Aria had said decades ago, the lines which made her famous. She was directed to say them like Aria. Like when Aria was angry. Like when Aria was happy. She had to weep like Aria had been heartbroken. And then do it again when she didn’t entirely capture that magic.

When they broke for lunch, she saw other analogs eating silently at their own tables. They were pale-looking figures in neutral-tone bodysuits. Evidently they were also awaiting the deepfake to cover up their real performance. Some moved in a robotic precision, already practiced in their replication. Others looked as new and lost as her.

The week passed by in a rush. Every day bled together in a monotonous cycle. She would stand on the clinically white soundstage. There wasn’t any backdrop or even a greenscreen, as that could all be added in later. She had to stand there with all eyes on her including dozens of capture sensors. She poured her energy into embodying Aria. Each time she deviated slightly, taking her own artistic liberties, she was critiqued by Jennie.

“Aria’s hand would’ve been raised a few inches higher when she said that.”

“The cadence of saying ‘starlight’ would have more inflection on ‘light’.”

“When you smile there, it’s showing too much teeth. Please keep your mouth closed.”

Min Jee went home each day exhausted. She felt like she was nothing more than a photocopier to replicate without the opportunity to inject any of her own original thought. The majesty of the studio’s tower felt like a sort of contemporary artistry she was being denied. This stifling affected her creativity when she was done from work too. As she tried to write her own original pieces, she felt a deep sense of writer’s block.

Still, Jennie was happy. She noticed how Min Jee pushed herself to replicate Aria’s performances. Sometimes one of her takes would have so much raw talent that it gave her pause. Min Jee’s performance wasn’t so much Aria but something distinctive. Jennie flagged these deviations for the AI to correct even as she held a curiosity for what she could do if given some freedom.

On Friday, Min Jee was surprised to see Bruno DeLeener in the room chatting with Jennie. When she came into the room, she was gestured to take a seat.

“Team, I just got the projections for the upcoming release of Alchemist’s Book...” he began.

“Alchemists Nook,” Jennie corrected.

“Our projections have just gone up, exceeding our expectations. This is only because of your hard work to quality and consistency, exactly what our audience has come to expect from us. We know the world continues to change unpredictably, and Aria remains a comfort and we will continue to honor her legacy.”

There was a habitual applause from the other analogs and Min Jee politely clapped as well. But she felt a tinge of regret around honoring the legacy of an actress long gone. Where was a freer market of art where people were able to create what they chose? A garden with one kind of flower hardly looked beautiful.

The freedom she did receive was economic. The stipend had given her an opportunity to take the monorail further uptown to the artisan districts. In dimly lit cafes and musty theaters she distributed her money to spoken-word poets and donate money to let a painter buy a new tube.

She enjoyed spending time in these spaces and meeting new people who saw art as a higher calling. She saw playwrights with ideas for stories she’d never considered before. She met musicians building new instruments out of recycled materials. Their work was often clumsy but occasionally brilliant. More importantly, they were willing to explore new ideas rather than circling a drain of stale ideas.

This gave Min Jee inspiration to pursue her own craft in her own way. When she was directed to deliver a line in Aria’s trademarked stoicism, she let out a soft whispering gasp afterwards. Once the line was spoken, she held her breath waiting for Jennie to notice and issue a correction, but her tiny rebellion hadn’t been caught.

Min Jee became emboldened and began to add her own signature variations on top of Aria’s performances, making sure she could push the envelope in each case without being caught. She held a glance a bit longer than Aria would, or modify her gait slightly, or blink more frequently than expected. None were particularly noticeable, but she enjoyed the feeling of self-direction and exploring a character in a way more personal than her mandated robotic directions.

These changes were noticed by Jennie when she spent each night in post-production, overlaying the captured performance with Aria’s likeness. The AI had been flagging Min Jee’s contributions with variance indicators. The first time they came up, she simply used the AI to correct the performances with tiny sensory adjustments as she usually did. Yet as they kept appearing, she began to wonder whether this was really an accident.

One evening in particular, Jennie was watching Aria delivering a eulogy built upon the underlying performance of Min Jee. Then she turned off Aria and watched Min Jee doing the same performance raw. The deepfake had stuck to the script and the blocking, but it couldn’t capture grief as powerfully as Min Jee. If it had been Aria, she would’ve lauded the fresh take. Yet since Aria never did, it couldn’t be said to be Aria-like.

Jennie knew it was a betrayal of her job to keep these variations in the final work. Yet she had been an artist, once, when she was young. She decided to allow some of Min Jee’s most defensible nuances to pass through the rendering pipeline. If asked, she could just call them “sub-perceptual deviations” and move on.

June was known as the top media critic in the “Aria-verse”. Her forums were usually full of unquestioning loyalty to Aria and the movies produced by AmaCo every month. Yet more recently, new threads had topics like “Aria has become predictable”.

As the admin of the forums and someone with encyclopedic knowledge, even June had started to agree. She saw how the originals had a human imperfection to them, whereas the latest movies felt overly polished without any opportunity for a moment to show the human soul.

Although the threads quickly turned into flame wars between critics and superfans, she could tell there was a vibe shifting beginning as the critics became more in number. Younger audiences didn’t remember the real Aria and rarely sought out the original works. They only saw the endless list of digital versions which replaced real actresses.

Jennie read these posts. The superfans were the ones who always saw these movies and purchased the merchandise. She could tell there was some people looking for something new, and she began to wonder if she already had the new thing under her contract.

Min Jee had been contracted for a new project, a new winter holiday special that would combine fake snow and old carols, all in the same likeness of Aria. In one scene, Min Jee was supposed to gaze into a holographic snow globe while softly humming the opening of a song.

She decided to take a bold step that morning. She approached Jennie, who was busy reviewing the script with a coffee in her hands.

“Ms. Kaplan,” she started nervously. “I had a proposal, for the snow globe scene. I know I’m supposed to just hum, but I had written a monologue that I could say instead. It would be me, playing an original character. I thought I could call her Luna, like about the moon. It’s just a few lines.”

Jennie set down the script and took the tablet that Min Jee clutched anxiously in her arms. She reviewed it. The speech was raw, awkward in some spaces, but absolutely out of character for Aria. Her responsibility at this stage would be to shut this down, to report Min Jee, and find a new actress.

Then she thought back to the fan forums, and she looked into Min Jee’s bold eyes. A new voice for half a minute couldn’t be that harmful. The monologue was... it needed work. It lacked the polish of a standard Aria script. Maybe that was good. Maybe Jennie had more to offer cinema than an echo of the past.

“The scheduling for this holiday special is tight though. And this... it needs a bit of work.”

“I understand, Ms. Kaplan.”

“I think there is an opportunity though. Something small. I can pass it to the writers to clean it up.”

“”Thank you, Ms. Kaplan,” Min Jee said, a genuine smile spreading across her face. “I really appreciate it.”

Jennie gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. “Don’t thank me yet, Min Jee. This is just an atmospheric test. We’ll call it ‘Luna’s Whisper’. We’ll see how this goes. It might not make the final cut.”

A few days later, Min Jee got her words back. They had been changed. Nothing significant, but she agreed that the modifications were an improvement. She stepped onto the small stage and spoke. She said Luna’s words, her words, with a heartfelt authenticity. She spoke about dreaming for the future, for all the ordinary people who wanted to see themselves.

Jennie spent the next few days watching the entire special come together. Bruno sat by her every morning as they watched the current cut. Every morning she looked nervously over at him as he took frantic notes about every little piece that was wrong and needed fixing. His comments were around the density of tinsel on the digital trees and the pigments of the costumes, but never on Luna.

As always, sales and views for this special were high. Jennie got a nice corporate bonus as a result. When she checked the forums, she didn’t see any discussions around the songs or the story. However, there was a lot of interest in the very brief appearance of ‘Luna’. People seemed intrigued. They posted a lot of speculation and wanted to learn more. They seemed more eager for Luna than Aria. It was clear that a new star was just being born.

The mornings were quiet now, giving Mason a sense of eeriness as he sipped his coffee and watched the sun rise. Not long ago, paper editions of Politico would greet him with a satisfying thud on the floor and a quick knock on the door. The absence of such a critical outlet was not entirely gone. After all, their office still had their digital access which was available on all their devices. Yet it was too easy to get distracted by other notifications and the onslaught of social media posts. Now, what made Politico any special from the rest of the online noise?

But then, it arrived. A junior staffer came into the room with a box they had picked up from the mailroom. The box was simple and white with a stylized “P” on the front contained within a simple circle. It looked like something out of Silicon Valley than something produced by journalists. On the back it read: “Designed in California. Assembled in Vietnam.”

“Great, leave it,” Mason said, already dreading having to set up another gadget.

Senator Itzel came in at that point, passing by the staffer and nearly spilling tea from her mug. She noticed the box and asked, “The replacement?”

“I can set it up for you today,” Mason offered, but then heard the buzzing from his phone. He pulled it up. “It’s Senator Thompson’s Chief of Staff. Please excuse me, ma’am.” He jabbed the answer button. “Dan, what’s new? The tablet? I don’t know why they decided to stagger the deliveries. There aren’t too many of us who would’ve requested it. No, I’m sure the Senator is seething right now. I wish I could help.”

As Mason was busy with the call, Maria took the box and carried it over to her desk. She grabbed a letter opener and sliced through the tape sealing the box. When she lifted the lid, she saw the Politico Slate nestled in a molded cardboard tray. The tablet was 7 inches diagonally, making it resemble something like a Kindle or iPad Mini. She lifted it and was pleasantly surprised by how it felt in her hands. Not too heavy, with a smooth back, and a color eInk display that promised no blue-light glare.

She touched the power button, which doubled as a biometric scanner. The button had a satisfying click as it powered on. As the device booted, she found a small USB-C cable at the bottom of the box. That was good. There was no need for proprietary nonsense in such a niche device. She hoped it supported wireless charging as well.

“Dan, I assure you I’m frustrated too,” Mason’s voice faded away as Maria began to tap the device’s interface and set it up.

She entered her Politico credentials and connected it to the office Wi-Fi. She thought back to her old days as a teenage hacker, lurking on message boards and an avid follower of the Cult of the Dead Cow. Those days, the world of the Internet seemed so small compared to the systems of the press. But now, the line between those blurred more and more.

The screen came to life. The homescreen was clean, blending the elements of a news website and a tablet interface. Each section of the news site: Congress, White House, Defense, and others, appeared as large, tappable icons.

The background of the homescreen had a subtle animated image of the Capitol dome which implicitly showed the current season and weather, giving it a touch of elegance. Small birds occasionally flew across the screen, adding a bit of liveliness. The details seemed well thought out.

The very top of the screen was the top few headlines of the day. The main headline read: “GRIDLOCK LOOMS AS BUDGET DEADLINE NEARS.” The bottom of the screen was a dock with quick access to saved articles, settings, and a stock ticker. Right now it just showed the default Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was slightly down given the budget issues.

A notification at the top of the screen invited her to the system tutorial, to acquaint her to the device’s features. She ignored it, instead jumping straight into the settings menu.

It had all the usual options like Wi-Fi, Display, and Accessibility. There weren’t any more complex features, like being able to access the file system or see a list of apps. The thing felt locked down, like a single-purpose gadget meant only for reading Politico. But every system was built on a stack of technologies.

She scrolled down to see further options: About Slate, Legal Notices, Open Source Licenses. She tapped on the last one, curious to see what open source components were used in the device. As she scrolled through the list of libraries and frameworks, she felt a bit of nostalgia for the days when she used to build things without needing to deal with bureaucracy. Then, she found a line of text that caught her eye:

Based on Android Kernel Version 6.14.

That made a lot of sense. Android would’ve given them a solid foundation to base their software, but it meant that this was just a device dumbed down for a specific audience. But underneath the glossy interface, it would have a bootloader, a file system, and all other kinds of vulnerabilities.

Mason finally hung up and let out a loud sigh. He smoothed over his hair with his hand, as he was done trying to pull it out from the call.

“Senator, this whole Slate thing is a mess. Thompson’s office is claiming the whole thing is a surveillance tool. Several staffers can’t even seem to log in. It’s a logistical nightmare.”

He stopped, expecting the legislator to be upset, or to discuss the potential political implications. But Maria’s attention was now fully captured on the device. It was now connected to her office computer, with the cable as an umbilical cord, and her monitor was now a black command terminal. She was already busy digging into the system and testing its limits.

“Don’t worry about it. I think this is going to be incredibly useful,” she said, with an uncharacteristic grin spreading across her face.

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