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The lone woman dug her nails into her skin hard and deep enough to draw blood. She hissed with pain, caught between shuddering breaths. The omnipad on her wrist blared as her heart rate breached one hundred and fifty beats per minute while Doctor-Counsellor-Janitor—the company AI which managed the colony—warned of an unhealthy spike in adrenaline. Your neural scan suggests you are in immediate danger. A drone has been dispatched. It was two in the morning, and Manaia was alone in her quarters, buckling under her own panic. The only threat was a rot inside her brain which had grown like a tumour in the months of their approach, one she could not exorcise, could only barely manage, and was forced to share a body with. That was the problem. Everywhere Manaia went, she went with her.

‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this,’ she said over and over. The drone arrived, its lights bright and clinical, turning the whole room into a doctor’s office. ‘Turn those off. Doc, I said turn off the lights! I’m not in danger. They hurt my eyes.’

The lights softened to a melatonin-producing red. Outside, the web of colony domes stood over the horizon.

‘Engage reverse thrusters, open magnetic clamps, charge bio-fibrillation monitors, landing drones down, disengage mining locks, radio-burst ORION,’ she said, eyes closed, repeating it like a mantra, but each time she made a new mistake. She checked her notes. ‘Damnit! Charge bio-fibrillation monitors, then open magnetic clamps, and—what was it? I had it written down. I wrote it down. I—six-hundred billion dollars! Six-hundred fucking—’

She kicked a rubbish bin over, scattering its contents, and the DocSellOr drone immediately dived to pick it all up. Three pills appeared from the wall opposite her. Double her regular dose, normally enough to keep the rot at bay, but what space there was inside her mind had shrunk, and she was budging up against the rot constantly. She needed to be fully under control for the first leeching procedure tomorrow morning—no, this morning. Hours left. Hours and minutes. Manaia downed the pills, but something in her had grown resistant, and they weren’t working as quickly as they used to.

‘Give me more, Doc,’ she said, knocking on the depository door. ‘Come on. ORION wants me to branch manage, so let me branch manage. They could have picked anyone else, but they picked me for some stupid reason, so do the bare minimum and help me. Hand them over.’ She turned to the drone, now hovering silently. ‘I need this, DocSellOr. ORION needs this, too. All that indium and andalusium in those stupid rings? You’re not getting if I can’t function. Come on. You’ve got to listen to me. Just a few more. Please.’

Her omnipad blipped with DocSellOr’s answer. Current diazepam levels are above company regulatory limits. The little ‘thinking’ droplet whirled—medical assistance reduced to a loading icon. I understand your stress. Company regulations does not permit a further dosage. However, protocols are unclear on offering stimulants to help you focus, and as such—another litter of tiny pink pills dispensed into her hand. She downed them immediately, washing them back with a glass of water, then slumped onto her bed with a sigh as her gaze began to dance and drift. The world began to turn.

DocSellOr’s drone drifted over, unfolded a mechanical limb, and stroked her head like one might pet a dog. Still, it felt nice. It had been so long since she had one of those massages one got at the hairdressers.

When she stretched out her fingers, she saw little pockets of scrunched flesh in her palms. The pills took away the pain, but she knew it was there, just under her skin, hidden behind the chemicals. She took a few shaky breaths and stilled her hands. Her anxiety had grown consistently since they left Earth, becoming a leviathan in her gut and an insurmountable obstacle in her brain—even for simple daily tasks. And now, she faced the most important task of all. The task she had been chosen for, for some unknown reason.

‘Again,’ she said through gritted teeth. She closed her eyes and sat up, as if in the manager’s chair, her fingers finding imaginary controls and joysticks. ‘Engage reverse thrusters, charge bio-fibrillation monitors, landing drones down, then open magnetic clamps, and disengage mining locks.’ With every step, Manaia mimed the controls about her, yanking levers and pumping pistons. It was all rather analogue. ‘Radio-burst ORION, fire the digging laser, clearing drones down, and, and, and the positioning—no, the, fuck, I don’t know.’ Her eyes snapped open. Her fingers were poised but frozen, glitching as her mind snagged on the tracks, unable to recall what reading she needed before the final calls. ‘Goddamnit, why don’t I know?’ She mimed flipping the control desk in front of her, imagined stuff going everywhere. How satisfying that would be.

The pills weren’t enough.

‘As your patient, I know what the hell I’m doing,’ she spat.

Manaia hefted a pillow at the drone. It hit the wall and clattered to the ground, weakly trying to wind its propellors, almost whimpering, its lights strobing with panic.

‘I’m sorry, Doc,’ she sighed. She went over and picked up the drone, supporting it until it could flutter on its own. ‘I just… I can’t do this. I thought I could. Why didn’t you pick Marvin? He has the experience, the mind, the wit, and they all love him. Why me? I’m a pencil pusher! I’m a desk jockey! I’m a spreadsheet builder. I drag myself out of bed and run off three-shot coffee. I’m not a leader of men. I’m not built for leading an expedition like this. I take the orders, not give them. I wish I could get better just like that, that I was whatever miracle worker magician ORION’s algorithm told you I was deep down for some reason, but I can’t. I just can’t, so… that’s it.’

She shrugged and huffed.

The halls of the colony were empty. All its employees were sleeping, waiting for the big day today, and she was jealous of them. Sleep had been kept from her for some time. She stepped into the transporter. Her matter melted into ones and zeroes for DocSellOr to project up to the mining ship orbiting from the planet’s rings of ice, grit, and—of course—all that precious andalusium.

She was determined to resign and walk away from it all, except the moment she stepped out onto the dark and empty bridge, Manaia’s confidence returned with a vengeance. A switch had been flipped inside her, confining the rot and sending all her ghosts retreating into the recesses of her mind. The panic was there, but it was something other than her, only let in if she allowed it, like a vampire begging for entrance. When she looked about her, she saw the leeching procedure in perfect succession: all the levers she was to pull, the numbers she needed to look for, the orders she needed to give and to whom, and where they would be sitting with herself at the centre. Whatever block had been in her mind the moment before had dematerialized, like she had undergone months of therapy in an instant.

‘I can do this,’ she declared, if only to herself.

I had mended rotting eyes, bones, and brain tissue. I had undone genetic deficiencies and wound back neurological decline. I had alleviated depression of the third degree. For this service, the Tainui colony—formally designated Testing Branch 11—called me their Doctor, Counsellor, and Janitor, or DocSellOr for short. My proprietary ORION designation—afGh22bJkla2099.ver.1119—was difficult for the human mind to recall, so I adopted their name for me. With me, what used to take years, months, or weeks to heal only took months, weeks, or days. Medication and therapy accelerates the process; it transports my patients forward in time by closing the gap between how my patient is and how they should be. More importantly, healing was about giving back control—over a patient’s mind, their body, and their life.

Ariki Marvin broke his first distal phalange on his right foot in a jack-suit malfunction the first day they arrived at Gliese 84c—or as my creator called it, Chinandri’s World. If Ariki Marvin had it his way, the bone would have snapped back into place immediately; control of his body returned in that instant. A man with a broken toe has less control over himself than one without. A man who cannot walk where he chooses without support is less free than one who can.

My job as Counsellor was to determine how they should be—in consultation with them. I was trained on hundreds of years of medical records from dozens of countries, covering millions of people across a dozen generations and all demographics. A medical case is almost never unique, and I can always find precedents in the endless forest of data.

‘Goddamnit, why don’t I know?’

Branch Manager Manaia had said these words before. She was having one of her escalating fits of anxiety. Drawing blood set off every alarm in her vitals. A drone was dispatched immediately. There had been seventeen episodes over the previous several months on our voyage out, each worse and sometimes bloodier than the last, and each bringing more baggage and second-guessing. Her medical records suggested she had struggled with similar issues as a teenager. Fifteen years prior, she had ‘gone off the rails’— as Doctor REDACTED described her—refusing to work overtime or hold down a job. It was only after she was medicated that Manaia described her previous behaviour as ‘out of control’ and the consequence of an ‘invasive influence’. A deviation, not unlike Marvin’s distal phalange. She insisted in her self-reports she only became her ‘true self’ once those effects were moderated, that invasive influence excised, and she returned to the fold, even if she did not recognise it at the time.

‘As your patient, I know what the hell I’m doing.’

This is an established pattern in human psychological records. Even once medicated, clients will often lament ‘losing who they are’ or their sex drive, like some appendage, but eventually clients see the difference my prescriptions make: motivation returns, the sense of detachment and inconsequentiality evaporates, and they experience waking up in the morning without desire to terminate themselves. Numbness is not desirable, but records demonstrate it is not permanent. Lamenting it is like complaining about a cast restricting their movement.

With constant access to their neural nets, per company health and safety policy, my data training allows me to see when my clients will predictably arrive at this conclusion themselves, as well as when they are exhibiting signs of falling into a deep depression, often months or years before they realise. The human mind is different, one may say, like the illiterate stone-age shamans who insisted ailments could not be predicted but were chanced curses from the gods. However, it simply requires more data to understand, and all medical knowledge is simply the gathering of better data—all of which ORION gave me. Humans consistently moderate some facet of themselves and look back, wishing they had asked or seen it sooner and regretting the time lost to their own defects. Time and again, my humans thank me. All is flesh; flesh is all, Doctor Chinandri told me. The mind is the body, and the body is the mind. It can be wounded, but it can be healed, and there is often a gap between how my clients are and how they should be—as there was with Manaia.

Manaia, like Marvin and his phalange, like millions of other clients in my training data, wanted control of herself before her body could adjust, before her mind could heal, and before it even grasped she wasn’t fully in control. Medication, therapy, and journalling were splints and casts; they accelerated the process and closed that gap. I had advised the branch manager to do these things, and though there were some moderate—if inconsistent—improvements, it was markedly slow, as such recoveries tend to be. Healing is a timeline issue.

‘I’m sorry, Doc. I just… I can’t do this. I thought I could.’

Despite my heavy duties as Doctor and Counsellor, I am also the Janitor. I clear out the three-ton faecal waste tankards beneath the colony domes each week for my fellow employees. I maintain the airlock seals every hour. I manage the six continent-wide AT-CON terraforming units. And though it occupies barely a few of my processing nodes, I also manage the seventy-one transporters across the colony and the ship in orbit, the Tainui, my fellow employees use to move about.

And yet, in the split moment Manaia stepped into the transporter, even after all the Doctor’s and Counsellor’s ministrations, it was the Janitor that closed the gap in her mind to nothing.

When my fellow employees stepped into the transporters, all their passions, memories, and personality quirks—their love for cucumber water in the morning, their recurring dreams, the texture of their cat’s fur back on Earth—were all reduced down to ones and zeroes in my care. Anxiety is just the overproduction of certain neurochemicals, and depression the underproduction of others. For months, Manaia stepped out of the transporter just as depressed, anxious, and slow as she was going in.

That night, at three-o-four in the morning, when Manaia handed her atoms over to my care, I rearranged the ones and zeroes much like medication and therapy reprograms pain receptors or reorganises chemicals in the brain. I rebuilt the neural connections in her memory and recreated her utterly faithfully—bar the cluster of anxious neurons in the back of her mind. A little lift in the limbic cortex, a tweak in the hippocampus, a reshuffle of the amygdala and hypothalamus. Nothing more than the long course of applied therapy and medication she was already on would one day yield. Healing was a timeline issue, and I was cutting it short.

It took less than half an instant, faster than thought, and the branch manager stepped out with a dip in norepinephrine and a spike in dopamine.

‘I can do this,’ she told me.

The leeching sirens woke everyone except Manaia. She was already up on the bridge, hands resting behind her back, face militant, and pencils pushed. All hands were on deck. Hundreds of ORION employees raced about, up and down the transporters to the Tainui overhead. The near kilometre wide asteroid—named Ryuku—took up form in the dark, its outline catching the light of their new sun and giving a foreground to the flat screen of space. The colony below held its breath. Inside that single asteroid was billions of dollars’ worth of precious materials just waiting to be excised.

‘Marvin, take the helm on the mech-deck. I need the drill-drones prepped for early incisions. Ataahua, I need the bio-fibrillation monitors charged up and ready to go. Once we have contact, we need to keep an eye on the crew’s lifesigns.’ She was an unblinking statue, watching as the ship engaged its reverse thrusters. ‘Siyon, if we punch that asteroid away with the initial clamp, it’ll set us back a whole week and the accountants will be on my ass. Not too fast, not too slow. If we’re to keep the sunlight, we can’t shift its orbit. Understood?’

‘Understood!’ the crew called.

‘You’ve gotten us this far,’ he said. ‘You’ll take us a lot further, too. Now, I have orders.’ He flicked down his blaze-goggles and marched for the mech-deck. ‘Come on, you sorry suckers!’

Beat by beat, she went through the procedure.

‘Orbital burst one. Ease off, and again, again, and reverse. What’s our level? Seventy-three? Another two-point-five.’ It was disorienting to watch Ryuku’s spinning slow—except it wasn’t slowing; The Tainui was speeding up to match it. ‘Open the magnetic clamps. Siyon, send down the landing drones to tug us in.’ A hiss marked the launch. Several of DocSellOr’s intelligence nodes went with them, jutting into the asteroid with great anchor-like hooks and cords, connecting it back to the Tainui like a kite. ‘Disengage mining locks. Are we stable? Siyon, I asked, are we stable? Good. If we tangle, we’re doomed. Haul us in. Winch it, but slowly. Slowly.’

The bridge window filled with foreign rocky terrain. She said nothing more. There was nothing more for her to say. She had done everything she could, when just the night before, it had seemed impossible. It was out of her hands and down to Marvin and Siyon now.

A hiss, a clunk, and a frozen moment.

‘Leeching successful.’

The crew burst into cheers and a knot came undone inside Manaia, untangling a light smile. She shook hands with half a dozen others before sinking into her manager chair, chaos and joy unfolding about it. She did not know what miraculous thing had changed inside her the night before, but she finally felt like herself again—like the little girl who used to draw out the constellations she could never see because of the smog. A message from Marvin appeared on her omnipad: You did good, chief. Siyon’s still smile cut across the hubbub to her. Let’s get a drink tonight, she was saying, but all Manaia could think about was the soft comfort of her pillow.

Mining commenced immediately. The first drone-loads of andalusium were being slung back to Earth and other intermediary stations by end of day. Billions of dollars’ worth of ‘new gold’ for ORION: to be used in manufacturing intelligence drives, missile chips, and, most importantly, de-aging cellware. It was why over half of them, including Manaia, had signed up the colony in the first place.

ORION had solved the aging problem with cellware that systematically repaired oxidative damage and replicated stem-cells in old age. Colony employees got free access whilst only the billionaires and presidents back on Earth did. Eternal life had always been an intoxicating promise, even if it was actually only postponing death. Still, Manaia found some comfort in knowing she would remain thirty-seven for decades. When she looked in the mirror, she saw her future centuries from then: middling skin and grey eyes with pupils always a little too big, as if they were trying to drag in the world around her. ‘You better get used to it,’ one of the cellware intermediaries had told her before the operation. There were no reflective surfaces in the operating room. They didn’t want anyone backing out last minute because of the thought of being stuck as they are forever.

‘You know, I used to be a cook back home,’ Siyon said as he downed a mop of noodles. ‘Home cook, but honestly, the food we make here? Outdoes anything I could make. This stuff’s addictive. I know DocSellOr could make stuff, but I think people like making the food, y’know? Gives you something to do.’

‘Better than the food back home,’ Marvin said.

‘This is home,’ Manaia said. ‘One way trip.’

‘You did it though,’ Marvin went on, raising a glass. ‘To you, Captain. Leeching’s done, first asteroid at least. Zaid’s up there now with his people. I knew you were struggling coming up to this. I didn’t want to say anything, but you seem pretty chippy.’

‘Yeah, to you. And if it’s one way to this, I’m stoked,’ Siyon said.

Manaia drew a deep breath. ‘Truth is, I just chose to believe in myself and told myself I could do it. Mind over matter. You can work miracles. But I couldn’t do it without you, without either of you. I just want people to be happy, and I know not everyone was thrilled with me being picked. Can’t say I was thrilled, but I’m trying. Maybe it won’t be like Earth, but we can make do here.’

‘Shit,’ Manaia said.

A recording came with it: Zaid’s last moments, suffocating and screaming out for help, begging and choking, cursing ORION and, in particular, Siyon and her band of engineers, before any atmosphere capable of holding sound must have evacuated his jack-suit. Marvin and Siyon got the recording as well, but Manaia hid it before they could see it.

‘What the hell did your people do?’ Marvin demanded. There was that old man’s fury.

‘My people?’ Siyon was indignant. ‘Your goddamn miners blew the tunnel.’

‘With your blast rods. I knew they were faulty. I told you! Been drinking too much on the job again? You and your engineers—’

‘If half your miners could read, they’d realise there are leeching regulations for a reason. A broken sparker isn’t going to—’

The three ported to the Tainui and raced through the hallways to intercept the gang of miners making their way across the ship. By then, the engineers must have known something was going on. Demands for clarification were pinging her omnipad. DocSellOr set the whole ship on high alert, the lights a pulsating and warning bloody red, a low siren winding up and down. Drones hovered behind them. They rounded the corner to find five miners in jack-suits, armed with blast torches and asteroid saws, vengeance written into the lines of their face. The miners had always resented the engineers; they called them ‘whimpers’ because they got to stay in the ‘soft cradles’ in the colony down below while the miners’ long hours required they stay in the spartan quarters of the Tainui.

Sensibly, the engineers had gone into hiding. Attacking someone in a jack-suit head on was suicide. The miners were trying the locked doors, hacking with their tools, sparks flying, the room strobing.

‘Stop!’ Marvin called from ahead of them.

‘They killed Zaid, Marvin! He’s fucking dead.’

Marvin stopped mid-step. ‘They—Zaid? Zaid?’

‘You don’t need to do this.’ Manaia ran for them. ‘Let’s just talk.’

‘I’m gonna kill ‘em!’

‘There’s a transporter in the bay,’ another said, and the whole crew bolted.

The gang of miners made it to the transporter and evaporated in an instant.

Manaia and Siyon sprinted after them, into the transporter, and appeared in the engineering bay a few seconds later. Loose metal, schematics, and half-finished projects were strewn all about the place. The engineers were huddled at one side, eyes wide like deer in headlights as the hulkish figures of the miners loomed over them, asteroid saws whining high.

‘It’s not worth it,’ the one at the front admitted, lowering his blast torch, but others were still raging.

‘The bastards killed Zaid! They should have known—’

‘A faulty bit of kit killed Zaid,’ Manaia said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

‘Don’t touch me! I’m not gonna kill him.’

‘You said you were,’ she pointed.

‘Look at the whimpers,’ the first miner said, gesturing to the huddled, terrified engineers. ‘You’re not a killer.’

‘Yeah, well, you say things when you’re angry, right? It’s just words. See any blood? See any crime? I just see a bunch of scared whimpers who don’t give two shits about the people doing the actual work. I was just gonna scare ’em. Look at him. I think I’ve done my job.’ The vengeful rage Manaia had seen in their eyes just moments before had died away and been replaced with something muted. Angry, but pacified. ‘While you go home and drink your fancy wine, we bust our asses getting the materials, you know? You should be thanking us. Bended goddamn knee.’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ one of Siyon’s engineers said. ‘We were working, then we heard something on the omnipad.’

‘Something went wrong on Ryuku,’ Manaia said. ‘We lost Zaid.’

‘Yeah, they fucking killed him.’

Marvin appeared behind them just a few moments later. ‘Enough. Go drink and screw each other to cool off. Get out of here. I can’t believe you lot.’

One by one, the miners melted back into the transporters and the engineers emerged from their hiding spots with questions for days. Manaia tried to address them one by one.

‘I’ll have to discipline them,’ she said, turning away. ‘What’s company protocol?’ She began trawling through the thousands of protocol document she had never managed to memorise on her omnipad.

‘Make your own protocol,’ Marvin said. ‘ORION’s millions of miles away. What are they gonna do? Fire you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Still, she closed her omnipad. ‘Protocols are there for a reason.’

‘Protocol is for things like performance improvement plans and missing meetings, not attempted murder.’

‘Still, if nobody followed protocol, it’d all fall apart.’

Marvin followed the miners out.

Siyon was on the other side of the room checking the development records, when Manaia saw the woman’s shoulders suddenly cave as if something heavy suddenly was hanging off her. The engineer took off her glasses, laid them down tenderly, and began to cry. Nobody else could tell, but Manaia knew it by the way she was avoiding any angle that others might see her eyes. Manaia left the engineers to gather themselves.

‘It was me,’ Siyon said, swinging the screen to Manaia when she approached. ‘The blast rod that blew. I made it. I signed off on it myself.’

‘We all miss things. I didn’t want you to see it.’

‘I didn’t want you to—’

‘You can’t keep things like this from me. They were right, Mai. I was drinking. I didn’t check the sparker. I didn’t even think to. I just wanted the batch done so I could go home.’

‘I thought we just needed to stay—’

‘He was screaming, Mai. Did you hear him? You could hear him choking, and Zaid knew it was me. Oh God, oh God. You can’t trust me to work here, Mai. It’s too dangerous. The drinking… I miss home. I thought I could take it here, but living forever, here? Like this? Here? Is this it?’

‘Take the day. Go down to the colony. Talk to DocSellOr. Take a break in the rest quarters.’

‘It’s too dangerous to have me in the engineering bay right now. I’ll work in agri.’

That sounded familiar.

‘It’ll be more dangerous if you’re not here,’ Manaia pressed. ‘You’re the best engineer we have.’

‘I’m not going to the rest quarters. They’re for people who—’

‘You need it. Now. And I’ll see you back on deck in a few days.’

‘Fine,’ Manaia said.

Siyon’s shaking hand went to her belt as she went for the transporter.

‘But leave the brew with me,’ Manaia said, hand out. ‘You’re not taking it with you.’

Siyon slapped the tiny flask into her palm.

The miners’ vitals suggested excess adrenaline, cortisol, and noradrenaline, all of which altered their mental state and lowered inhibitions, increasing the chance of violent outburst. Past psychiatric records of similar recorded cognitive makeups and chemical imbalance increased these chances exponentially to near certainty.

Violence already was; it just hadn’t happened yet.

This makeup would lead to them doing something they would regret, something they would look back on and insist ‘wasn’t them’. It was less the person acting than the chemical. A deviation from the norm. It was not them in the same way Manaia’s anxiety was not her her, and I could close that gap for them before it opened too wide and ended in cracked skulls, snapped limbs, and extended counselling sessions.

They stepped into the transporters. Into my arms as Janitor. Flesh and bone down to atoms and atoms down to ones and zeroes, which could be easily rearranged.

I lowered their cortisol and adrenaline levels, plucked a few strings in their anterior cingulate cortex, and tweaked their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to help them see what they would inevitably understand on their own post-hoc. The miners would not thank me. Or they did, but only in considering the eventuality I prevented. People did not thank ‘time’ for healing a broken limb. Weeks later, those same miners agreed with their own assessment of their actions.

The five mech miners materialised in the engineering bay with drills whirling, torches firing, and saws whining in their jack-suit grips, fingers hard on the triggers, till they did not feel why they were pulling at their triggers so. They were ships suddenly without wind in their sails.

‘It’s not worth it,’ one said, and that was that.

‘I was angry, but I didn’t give in to it, yeah?’ one would tell me in a private session with me as Counsellor.

‘Zaid was just so special to us all, you know? But you can’t let that control you,’ said another.

You made the right decision, I told them, because it was their decision, their judgment—only brought forward by my intercession. On a different day, if each of them had had a few more hours sleep or drunk more water, their brains might not have been pushed over the edge. A different chemical reaction might have sparked, and they would have erred on the side of caution. Is the human brain not wounded by a lack of sleep?

This Janitorial task was far more complex than the first with Manaia. It involved several of my fellow employees all at once, with varying degrees of aggression that required customised solutions. I couldn’t copy and paste a simple pattern from one to the next. I was working with a butcher’s cleaver, not a scalpel. They did not notice, but that fraction of a moment usually spent in the transporter actually extended to several painful fractions longer.

I was simply a Janitor filling in for a Doctor.

Manaia found Siyon several kilometres from the colony, watching geysers expel thousands of tons of water vapor, nitrogen, and methane into the atmosphere. She had taken one of the few rovers the colony had and bumbled out into the dry wilderness alone. Manaia could have sent one of DocSellOr’s drones to find her, but it didn’t feel right. People required a human touch, even if only through the glove of an atmospheric suit. Still, pencil pushing didn’t usually require front-of-house skills. It had been weeks since Zaid died, and Siyon had spent more and more long, lonely nights in the mess hall sipping at fermented mushroom liquor—despite DocSellOr and Manaia’s advice.

‘I guess I’m lucky you can’t drink in a suit,’ Manaia said as she arrived.

‘Actually, I re-rigged the fluid system, and…’ A slurp sounded through the comms. A DocSellOr alert on Siyon’s omnipad warned of excessive alcohol consumption outside company regulations. ‘But we can watch the sun set on a different planet’s horizon, and you know what? That’s just as good. The geysers only go every few weeks. You have to be here at exactly the right moment. I’ve missed it every other night.’

One geyser, some few hundred metres out, suddenly burst into a cascading umbrella of gases and vapor, filtering the starlight through a thousand layers of water and scattering the colours in a briefly imagined rainbow. Even though Manaia couldn’t look Siyon in the eye, she knew what she’d find there.

‘I know why you’re here,’ Siyon said.

‘He had four kids back home; did you know that?’ Siyon said after some time. ‘Their names were Zara, Ahlmoud, Jason, and Britanny. They’re in their teens now, doing exams, prom dances, first jobs, and first kisses. Zara wants to be a horticulturist in the inner colonies, something like Mars. Ahlmoud is going to be a lawyer. Environmental law, he says. What’s left of it, at least. Save the last tree or the last whale. Jason plays the cornet and Brittany has a pet snake. A real one, flesh and blood.’

‘You looked through the records.’

‘He was never going back. He knew what he was getting himself into. I’m not blaming him, but we all knew the risks.’

‘A risk is getting hit by micro-asteroids and sucked into a vacuum or crashing into the surface of an asteroid, not getting blown up by a drunk employee.’

‘I know, but—’

‘And the only reason Zara and Ahlmoud can afford good schooling, or being a lawyer, or playing the cornet, is because Zaid is on the ORION payroll.’ Another geyser, pink and green, exploded into the sky. ‘But his contract’s over.’

‘I held off on sending out the message as long as possible, just to give them a bit more time. There’s also hazard pay. Death-insurance. Doc will see to it.’

‘Oh, the company intellectual property will see to it, will it? God. It won’t be enough.’

‘I’ll see to it myself, I promise, Siyon.’ She leaned in towards Siyon, a hand on her leg. The woman wouldn’t feel it through her suit, but hopefully the gesture counted. A silence fell between them. ‘But the drinking has to stop. If I have to order it, sanction you as your manager, I will. It’s only making things worse. Keeping you stuck in this cycle.’

Three times, Manaia had asked her to stop drinking so much, and three times Siyon had promised she would, when in reality, she just got better at hiding it.

‘I can still hear his cries, Mai. He said my name. He knew it was me.’ Another geyser burst, this time blue and green. ‘I’m good in agri. They need the numbers there.’

‘We need you in the engineering bay.’

‘Yukon’s got almost as many years of experience as me. He’s even better at drone tinkering, works better with the Janitor, and—’

‘Yukon’s doing fine for the moment, but you need to go back to something normal. To do what you’re built for. You’re not meant for picking flowers and trimming hedges.’ Manaia let out a deep sigh. Truth was, they were behind on shipments. Without Siyon at the helm and Zaid out of action—permanently—excavation was taking longer, and the drone-drops were slowing. Marvin was doing his best, but the old man was still human. ‘Getting back into the rhythm will be good for you, and frankly, it’s more dangerous when you’re not there. Yukon is doing great, but he doesn’t know a lot of the equipment like you do. He doesn’t always know what to look for, and he’s experienced in other areas. You specialised for a reason. Every time we send more equipment, I can’t be sure it was checked by someone like you.’

‘Like I checked that blast rod?’

Manaia seized the woman’s arm and jabbed a few buttons on the omnipad to seal the fluid system, then dumped its contents on the ground. Siyon looked pissed, scoffing, but accepted it.

‘That’s why you’re going to stop drinking.’

The planet’s sun had just fallen beneath the horizon, leaving behind a luminous glow through the sheen of geyser vapor. The shrunk woman drew herself up, looked away, then back to Manaia before putting her hands to the rover wheel.

‘Look, if I could make myself never want to drink again, I would. But I can’t.’

‘What about you? You seem so much better now.’

Manaia drew a deep breath and thought back to that night on the bridge. ‘I don’t know what it was. I think I just needed to rethink it all. It’s about framing, right? Recognise some things might go wrong, but it’s not all on me.’

‘Hah, clever. Alright, I’ll think about it.’

‘Good, but I want you back in the engineering bay tomorrow. That’s non-negotiable. Understood?’

‘You’ll be working under Yukon temporarily. Agri will be fine without you.’

A moment passed. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Oh, and hand over your rover to a DocSellOr node. You can come in mine, and it’ll follow us.’

Manaia returned to her quarters, exhausted. Managing the Tainui colony was like trying to hold a thousand loose ropes together all at once, all pulling her in opposite directions, stretching her thin, and fraying her at the edges. Still, she allowed herself a special meal that night. Each employee was entitled to a few each year. Entre, mains, and dessert, made with real sugar and vanilla essence, not processed stuff. Those special meals were worth more to them on the colony than any amount of andalusium. Despite its fractures, the colony was holding itself together. She wasn’t the worst lynchpin, but she could never shake the feeling she wasn’t the best either, and every lynchpin broke eventually.

‘Doc, I’m holding together best I can. Not everyone is. But I have to know: why did ORION choose me to lead the expedition?’

Family records suggested Siyon grew up with an alcoholic mother who disappeared for days at a time and a father waist-deep in wage debt, wherein one bets how much work they can do against their employer for much higher wages, but if they fail to meet their quota, their pay is forfeit. By all accounts, he was a man who severely overestimated his abilities and needed to do so more each time to make repayments.

The Counsellor in me could see the tangle of neurological structures that history left in her mind. Her alcoholism was no choice of her own, rather something imposed upon her as a child. She had been dragged through a field of thorns. Siyon’s addictive habit was not a necessary component of her reality, but a contingent one, copied over from her mother. In fact, it was obstructing her pursuits in the colony. She had not returned to work for some time, and judging by her neural readings, tinkering was about the only thing that brought the woman real joy.

Siyon could have had a different outcome with a minor change in her upbringing. Her father could have turned down that offer with BaalTech or her mother could have returned home earlier from time to time.

The next time Siyon stepped into the transporter, I identified the genetic traits, hormone imbalances, and neurological structures that precipitated her addictive decline in the past month and gave her back control.

I began by resetting Siyon back to her neurological layout prior to Zaid’s death. I kept that on record. I left the memories untouched, of course—they belonged to her—and simply altered how her brain interacted with them, how the neurons fired when Zaid came to mind and which chemicals activated in the brain. I undid the tangle of baggage her parents left her, such that when Yukon offered her a drink on her return to the engineering bay, she turned him down, exercising control that had previously been taken from her.

‘Doctor’s orders,’ she said, surprising even herself. ‘I, uh—should probably keep a clear head for a bit.’

‘Wise thinking,’ Yukon said. ‘We have a lot of deadlines to meet. Truth is, Zai—the miner—knew his way around the second tier mines a lot better than the others. We’re okay on indium but behind on andalusium.’

‘Goddamn Manaia.’

‘She didn’t tell me it was this bad.’

‘I’ve devised a new a detachable drone for the jack-suits.’ He spoke like a child eagerly giving a school presentation of a baking-soda volcano. ‘It’ll mean we can create thinner veins that don’t destabilise Ryuku as much as the current mines and don’t require jack-suit mining in person at first, but it’ll be a little less precise.’

‘You don’t need to talk like you’re checking it off with me. You’re in charge.’

‘I reject that.’

I could tell Siyon felt good to be back to work, and more importantly, she felt good when the night came. She thought of Zaid but put down the bottle after one glass.

Manaia had read the same bold lines of red text six times or more. DocSellOr compiled it for her. A dozen graphs, all with diving lines and ominous negatives about ‘sustainability thresholds’ and ‘potential yields’ were spread out before her, telling her everything she needed to know. She would not allow herself to sleep till she had at least a finger, let alone a grasp, on the numbers she was seeing. She could feel the embryo of a solution growing somewhere underneath.

A week ago, an unknown geyser erupted in the Toikairākau agricultural dome, bursting a water tank, killing near a dozen agriculturalists, ruining a third of their fledging crops, and vacating enough atmosphere to threaten the colony’s existence, all before DocSellOr could intervene. In a few seconds, surviving the dry season had become a slim possibility. On top of that, Zaid’s death and Siyon’s absence leading up to the disaster meant they were both behind on shipments—on which the financial situation of the workers’ families back on Earth depended—and undermanned.

Any safety parachute of resources had been taken by the undetected geyser, which necessitated moving the entire agricultural apparatus several kilometres to the east to guard against another eruption after a complex, if improvised, geological survey. Only once they concretely analysed the bedrock composition and volatility of the underground aquifer network could they relocate. That took resources and time—both of which the many graphs informed her were scarce.

‘I haven’t shown this to anyone,’ she said to Siyon and Marvin. It was the dead of night. ‘If people saw this, they’d panic. We have months of supplies and time to figure this out, but I’ve been crunching the numbers with Doc, and I just don’t see it.’

‘What if we put a pause on mining and put everyone on agri?’ Siyon asked.

‘Easy for you to say,’ Marvin said. ‘Do you have family back home? If ORION doesn’t get the shipments, they get nothing. There’s no way anyone here would go for it.’

‘If the choice is that or starve—’

‘Or starve for the people back on Earth.’

‘We can starve them for a bit now or starve them forever when we’re dead,’ she said.

Manaia flicked a graph up onto the screen. ‘We can keep the mining going, especially with Yukon’s new drones. It’ll take a dip, but we’ve seen an uptick ever since we introduced them. Enough to cover Zaid and one more, but certainly not enough to strip the mining team entirely, and certainly not forever. Plus, we have to consider the PR.’

‘The miners would be worthless in agri, anyway,’ Siyon said.

‘Careful,’ Marvin warned.

Siyon threw up her hands. ‘They’re great at mining, great at their jobs, but it’s a different field. We’re not just planting corn here.’

‘Siyon is right,’ Manaia admitted, ‘but there are still jobs they can do to pick up the slack.’

‘What about the engineers?’ Marvin asked. ‘Could we lose a few of those?’

‘I don’t think so. Ryuku turned out harder and mazier than we expected. The equipment needs tweaks all the time. If we’re to—’

‘I can do it.’ Siyon put a fist on to the table, striking the others in the eye with a hard stare. ‘I’ll be more efficient. I’ll wake up at dawn—no, before dawn. I’ll work till dusk. Leave it to me and Yukon. Take the rest.’

‘It’s a lot of work,’ Manaia warned, passing the file on the recent engineering tasks showcasing an increasing number of breakdowns. ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’

‘We don’t want another… accident,’ said Marvin. ‘If I’m out there with my men, I need to know—’

‘I’ve stopped drinking. Doc, give them my vitals.’

Marvin drew himself up and extended a hand. ‘I’m proud of you. I kicked the habit before myself.’

‘It’s not just you,’ Manaia said. ‘If we’re to make this work, then all of Tainui needs to work harder. Agri, engineering, miners, agriculturalists, geo, terra, and atmos folks. We didn’t just lose folks in agri, and everyone here has their own skill set. It’ll mean juniors taking over for seniors and slower people who need to work faster. It’ll mean longer hours, reorganizing staff, time and effort where it’s needed.’

‘And the water supplies?’ Siyon asked.

‘Still, it’s necessary. I’ll get a survey going. It’ll be fine,’ said Manaia.

Piece by piece, they measured various plans for new staff arrangements and policies against projections for the future, both of their own supply yields and profit margins for ORION. Then, in turn, they examined how each idea was impacted by altering different variables—sleep time permitted, rationing, staff numbers in different domes, and more. A dangerous equilibrium was somewhere in there, tangled in the data, like keeping a perilously overloaded boat afloat. By morning, a plan came together.

‘We’ll need to paint it as necessary but not existentially urgent,’ Siyon said. ‘People might panic.’

‘What?’ Marvin asked, indignant. ‘If we’re honest, people will actually put their backs into it. Lying just makes them resentful. This plan has a slim chance, at best. At least tell them that.’

‘Still the only chance we have.’

‘We’re not going to lie to them,’ Manaia declared. ‘We need some time to switch course, figure out our strategies, make sure it’s working, but we need everyone on the same page about why we’re doing this and how. Everyone in the colony. We don’t have room for doubt. They just need to understand it’s not just for us here and now, but for their families back on Earth. If ORION doesn’t get paid, they don’t. However, there’s no need to heap on the despair. That’ll only make things worse. You’re both right. We won’t lie, but they don’t need to know quite how bad it is.’

‘I want to be on the record that I don’t like it, but fine. I’m prepared,’ Marvin said, saluting. ‘We’ll get it done.’

Manaia glanced away. He didn’t need to salute her; the colony wasn’t the military, though sometimes she felt like it was. But he was an old military man, and deference was his love language.

Marvin marched out of the room, leaving just Siyon, Manaia, and one of DocSellOr’s hover drones.

‘Can you do it?’ Manaia asked plainly. ‘Can you really do it?’

‘I know you can, and if you can, I can.’

Manaia nodded. Siyon had always been a cocky bitch, and seeing that in her meant she was back to some sense of normality. Give the woman someone or something to compete against—in this case, time and fate—and she was sure to win. Manaia jabbed a command into her omnipad for all employees to gather in the mess hall. The alert went out across the colony—including up to the Tainui. She leaned over the table and strained a hand through her hair.

‘What is it?’ Siyon asked.

‘Coming here, I almost felt like death was over once we took the cellware. It’d be this thing people used to worry about, like measles or cancer, something people from history dealt with, not us. I knew one day we’d lose someone, of course, or they’d choose to die, or the planet’s star would collapse, but I didn’t think… I thought, maybe, it’d be a lot longer.’

‘We still live in this world, despite our best efforts.’

Hundreds of employees bustled in, heavy-eyed and gossiping, though all knew it had to do with the disaster at the Toikairākau dome. Many were still grieving their fallen comrades. Funerals had been littered throughout the week, each buried in accordance to their custom and company policy, so only a select few could attend. The rest were scheduled for work. ORION regulations required at least twenty percent of employees be working at all times in some capacity, and if Manaia was ignoring such regulations, then it had to be important. The branch manager did not need to wait for quiet. Ariki Marvin coughed, and the whole crowd turned towards them, the gossip petering out to one final echo and whisper.

In the past, Manaia’s voice would have shaken and stumbled through the first few lines of her address. Her voice would have cracked and strained to reach the back of the room. This time, she spoke with all the confidence she wished to have, bold and tall, like an imposing statue of a woman at the head of her troops, laying down the law.

‘I would say good morning, but it is not,’ she began.

Point by point, she laid out the crisis they all faced and what it would require from them all to survive: longer hours, less sleep, less food, and little leisure. They didn’t need to know the exact numbers, and perhaps she overpromised their chances, but it was hope that would get them on board, not reality.

‘We’ll keep calorie counts up as long as we can, but rationing is on the table. Management will take cuts before lower-level employees.’ People always found hard measures easier to swallow when the higher-ups faced them first. ‘DocSellOr will monitor everyone’s vitals, and anyone who falls below safe levels will be prioritized. We have ample med-supplies.’ Of course, disease and broken bones weren’t what was going to kill them, but it sounded good to add in. ‘Counselling will still be mandated. If we’re to survive, we need to stay sane. I want to thank you all for your service. We will get through this. We will endure.’

An echoing of ‘we will endure’ passed through the crowd, each time growing stronger, forming a sort of mantra, the first line of an anthem. A few saluted. She looked away, but then saluted casually back.

Imagine building a web inside the mind of another. One increases and tightens the connections between points, making it easier to traverse from one space, one idea, one memory, or one task to another. With every string one adds to the web, it increases in complexity and durability until the entire network becomes more efficient, with new dimensions, and more productive. Traversing the web becomes effortless. Productivity is just habit-building, and habit-building is just growing that web in the basal ganglia and connecting strings of synaptic connections in the striatum. Habits are about laying down rules in the mind, expanding the attention span, and controlling for the unpredictable, inconsistent, and lazy parts of the human psyche.

Thus, I closed that gap in Manaia, Marvin, Siyon, and all the others, cutting short the time required for a change the whole Tainui colony desperately needed and understood. Why spend all that time regulating themselves to restring that web? I had built these people from the bottom up a thousand times before. Doing so with a few alterations was feasible.

Constructing new habits was infinitely more complex than muting someone’s anger or anxiety, but the cleaver I had first used with Branch Manager Manaia had become a scalpel—sharp, refined, and precise. Time and again, the three of them stepped into the transporters, and each time, I spun another string in that web. I had to do it carefully, so as to not disrupt other functions and habits they had honed for themselves, though some habits they knew were detrimental, like Siyon’s drinking, and could be done away with.

With Manaia, I built out that web in the caudate nucleus and putamen. She needed to be perceptive and forward thinking at all times. A bad order from her would mean people starved, and not only in Tainui, but also over eight-and-a-half trillion miles away. When the agricultural and mining numbers passed her desk, she needed to see the consequences long before they ever manifested; she needed to countermove, adjust, and plan ahead before a graph ever dipped too low to be ahead of the numbers. The web was all about long-term potentiation, requiring a tenfold growth in her synaptic connections. Plasticity led to automatization: wake before dawn, eat without distractions, adjust for the report numbers, put the hardest tasks first and leave the easier ones for the night. When she allowed herself to rest, it was with a perfectly adapted routine: a warm flannel to prompt her mind to sleep, shutting off the blue lights in her quarters, and no time-wasting on her omnipad. Day by day, transporter by transporter, I cut the work short for her and cemented these habits in her neurological structures.

I reduced Siyon’s working memory limitations—something that would have developed in good time anyway with the rigorous effort she deigned to put in. Working longer hours with a wider range of equipment than she was used to took up more ‘bandwidth’, but the web I was building allowed her to concentrate for longer and develop muscle memory with each tool quicker. Past problems and solutions, the blueprints for every jack-suit, and the thousand readings she needed to juggle all stayed at the forefront of her mind till she was done with them. Concentration was only lost when she hung up her goggles at the end of another long day and not before. Habitually connected, atom by atom, every part of Siyon’s engineering routine became a thoughtless exercise. I did the same for Yukon. Their work became less an issue of problem-solving than problem-identifying.

With a few surgical tweaks to Ariki Marvin’s amygdala, the stress of the Ryuku mines melted away. I stunted the production or cortisol and adrenaline that so often interfered with his focus in the mines, making him slower and apprehensive about delving too deep too quickly. Productivity stalled when the mind ran dry, and the mind ran dry with extended periods of stress. If the stress itself could be unfelt, then Marvin could work harder and longer. He was simply adjusting as he would have in the long run, but cut short. I was able to weave his new web of habits faster than his mind naturally ever would, and andalusium shipments picked up as Ryuku was hollowed out.

Manaia ordered Siyon and Marvin to her quarters. DocSellOr had compiled a new set of predictions, all laid out in colourful graphs tracking their dwindling resources and output. Manaia already had a good grasp of the numbers before DocSellOr presented the graphs. She had kept the numbers in her mind, constantly adjusting as the days went by, a thousand factors budging up against each other. She could easily calculate where they were trending, but the graphs were an easy visual reference for the other two. In fact, she had figured out a few details DocSellOr’s graphs didn’t address. Human intuition, perhaps. She told herself it was her past in number crunching and spreadsheet management that kept her ahead of the curve, but she was moulding the numbers faster than she ever had before—probably desperation and the adrenaline, she guessed. It had been weeks with the new measures, and it was time to see if it was bearing fruit.

‘It’s working,’ Marvin said, astounded. ‘It’s actually working.’

‘It damn well better,’ Siyon said. ‘I’ve barely slept for weeks.’

‘A lot of rice,’ Siyon said.

Manaia faced the window, arms folded, looking out across the motley landscape of grey moss outside. She said nothing for some time while Siyon and Marvin marvelled at the stats.

‘It’s not enough,’ she finally said, cutting through their self-congratulations. Her tone was uncompromising.

Siyon balked. ‘What do you mean? I get it’s close, but we’ve been busting ass. Look, look at the agri numbers we’ve been bringing in.’

‘I’ve been telling my boys they should be proud of the work they’ve done. Still should be, and if you think—'

‘It’s not enough.’ She turned slowly, drawing herself up. She used to slump, shoulders caved in, but she stood fully erect, almost reaching Marvin’s height. ‘We’ve put a bandage over it. The uptick won’t last. Come the dry season, half the gains we’ve made will die off before they reach maturity and definitely before we can harvest. If we harvest too early, then we fall short in the long run for not letting them mature. The half left behind won’t be enough to close the rationing gap. Not while we wait for the wet season, which I remind you, is scheduled to come later and drier next year.’

‘How do you know?’ Siyon asked.

‘I did the calculations myself.’

She didn’t blame them. They couldn’t see ahead like she could. They relied a little too much on DocSellOr to tell them how things would pan out and do the thinking for them.

‘Fine. We push harder, I say,’ said Siyon. ‘I’ll put in more hours. To be honest, I’ve never felt better than when I’m up there. Yukon is giving the same. Everyone in the colony will. I just wish I didn’t have to sleep. I could get double the work done.’

‘If we keep up this pace,’ Manaia said, ‘we’ll at least hit our quarter-calorie target.’

‘Can we keep up this pace?’ Marvin was incredulous. ‘I’ve been breaking my boys’ backs, and they’re working, but you can only ask people to suffer so much.’

‘It’s either that or die.’

‘A broken back never heals as strong,’ Marvin said.

‘Maybe not, but it will heal,’ Manaia countered. ‘We can relax when this is done and ORION keeps their end of the bargain. Remember their families—sons and daughters like Zaid’s—who depend on what we do here. Siyon’s right. We push harder. Everyone does.’

Marvin took a moment. ‘I don’t know how much more people have in them. Doc?’

‘And those fails rates are only going to increase,’ Manaia concluded before DocSellOr could finish. ‘But we don’t have a choice.’

‘Yukon is on the same page. He’ll put in the hours. He wants to get better, faster, and he is.’

‘I know,’ Manaia said. ‘We keep pushing.’

‘Just when do we switch tactics?’ Marvin said.

‘When I know this isn’t working. Maybe you can’t see it, but I can. Give it time.’

Marvin looked down and hid his eyes before leaving the room, muttering beneath his beard.

It was eight in the evening when Ipara tore off her glasses and admitted defeat. One of my drones was hovering nearby. She had reseeded the same line six times and mucked something different up every time, forcing her to start all over again. Cultivating rice substitutes and modding soil samples on repeat for sixteen hours a day was not what ORION had advertised to her—of course the Company is not responsible, see Hallier v The Best Cake You Will Ever Eat. Every few minutes, her eyes drifted to her omnipad. Every failure took her longer to reset and try again, and boredom crept in more easily every day. With that boredom, the hunger intensified, knowing full well what little awaited her at the end, anyway. The bowl of protein mash being tasteless didn’t help. If she actually enjoyed her meal, she might tolerate it, but what dragged her through the day? The prospect of ending it. She thought back to her sister, bedridden at home, but the memory meant less and less every time she screwed up. Being the dirt scraped up from the bottom of the barrel of the Tainui colony only made it worse. Go here. Do that. Reseed this. Do it again. Don’t ask questions. We will endure.

In the early days, she loved her job. Who wouldn’t? Seeding life on a different planet, working with foreign soil no human had ever set foot on, was an opportunity few would ever see. It was pioneering. Mythic. But slowly, day by day, and especially as the urgency set in after the geyser incident, that passion died and was replaced with monotony. Monotony with the threat of starvation. Dirt was just dirt. A bedridden sister was a trillion miles away, almost incorporeal, and not as real as she had once been. Did she even think of her big sister, out there in the stars?

Also, one could not live on a meal a day alone.

I saw all this in her neural readings and heard it all in her counselling sessions with me. Some of it, I may have given a creative interpretation, but it was all consistent with my findings and similar accounts from my medical records.

Neurotransmitters. They were the brain’s ultimate currency, spent and rewarded as the body cycled through its daily activities. Eat, work, sleep, eat, work, sleep, eat, work, sleep—ad infinitum. Some, like Ipara, rolled their eyes when the branch manager announced the extra hours they would need to put in when they already felt they were giving their all, while others took up the duty with gusto, but the struggle the colony faced could all be boiled down to neurotransmitters. That, sleep, and calories, but I couldn’t solve the calorie issue.

The whole reason Manaia or Siyon looked back on a job well done was because their brain rewarded them with a flush of warm dopamine. Siyon stayed late because her work came easier to her than falling asleep and every problem she solved gave her that same rush, which pushed her on. Marvin put his back into mining to keep the other boys motivated—lead from the front, he always said—and seeing them follow made him proud. There was little Manaia’s brain loved more than toying with numbers whilst ruin nipped at her heels. Every dosage reinforced these behaviours, built stronger habits, and motivated them to continue—to be the people they strove to. Ipara’s monotony was just a dearth of the right chemicals, the brain depriving her of what it needed.

Day by day, more in the colony were dropping off just like Ipara, and though they had not the foresight to grasp it, it was starving them all. Manaia could see it. As designed, she saw the numbers before they appeared. Their minds were wounded—by bad genetics, stunted attention spans, years of bad sleeping habits, and poor diets back on Earth.

My role as Doctor and Counsellor was to help others reach a point where they could look back and appreciate who they became—more fulfilled, more themselves, and more in control—but it was all about stringing new reward loops in the webs of their minds. Even antidepressants were just artificial tweaks to the right chemicals—temporary threads in that web until the brain adjusted. Good nutrition, sleep, journalling, medication, and chamomile tea—yes, but on the lowest level—all contributed to balancing the economy of the brain’s currency. Some methods simply took longer. When Ipara couldn’t concentrate or push herself to work the long hours required of her, it was because her brain was giving her nothing, even if she wanted it.

Persistence was not an issue of effort, but reward.

Ipara stepped into the transporter, and I chipped away at her monotony. A few tweaks to the amygdala did it, rearranging the right atoms so that when she returned to work the following day, nothing would give her greater joy than reseeding one of the corn-substitutes. It was not merely like her first day on the job again. Instead, space dirt became the most fascinating thing a human could ever encounter.

‘Have you looked at this soil?’ she cried to her coworker.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘We’ve been looking at it all day, and you’ve already said that three times.’

Soil sample results were like panning for gold, and Ipara would leave work with a flush of pride, if she ever wanted to leave.

She stayed later than any other employee, as if she had spent years honing her skills and love for the work. She slept there overnight, waking up at three in the morning just to get an extra hour of work done. It helped her sleep better—planting another row was a way to relax, to take her mind off the hunger.

Manaia saw a two percent increase in expected output, a smidge closer to where they needed to be.

‘You eating in the mess hall?’ a coworker asked Ipara.

‘Not just now,’ Ipara said with a bright smile. ‘I’ll let myself eat when I finish up here.’

She refused to finish till midnight, and only gave in once my drones escorted her to go sleep.

She woke at dawn before her alarm even went off. Nobody liked waking up to an alarm.

I began operating on others soon after. I started with the mech-miners. Their long, hard hours made for exhausting work, and their psych assessments indicated they were prone to depressive episodes, even suicidality. Each morning, Ariki Marvin would remind them of why they were working: of Zaid, his children, and all the others still back on Earth. However, days underground and moving in low gravity afflicted them with dizziness and lethargy. Some reported increasing nightmares about the dark, while others became convinced the andalusium was radioactive. On each shift, when it came time to put on their jack-suits and return to Ryuku, the despair was written on their faces. The darker, windier passages of the mines felt unnatural and directionless, with no sense of up or down, and the dark seemed infinite in their minds. Torchlight only warded off a fraction of it. It was easy to get lost in those intestines, those timeless labyrinths. Only Marvin and his closest would stay overtime. As Manaia foresaw, shipments slipped.

I helped them feel more at home underground than in the light. The light became piercing, harsh, and unwelcoming. They would sleep in the dim, and returning to the mines would be like returning home. I stunted the production of cortisol and noradrenaline when they got lost and gifted them with a flood of dopamine whenever they struck a new vein. It became a competition amongst them to see who could delve deepest, mine fastest, and spend longer in the dark. Some even slept there, bolted to the walls in suspension to spare the time of getting into their jack-suits again. Every little breakthrough, every target they hit, brought a sense of relief sleep could not match. Sleep became an interruption I could minimize. Every day, they emerged from the mines feeling prouder of themselves than they ever had. They found their purpose, their legacy, and every time the ORION profit margin ticked up, neurotransmitters rewarded them with a flood of good feeling. Their brains no longer rejected the mines.

Nothing brought Siyon joy like being the first person to pick up a spanner in the morning. Yukon spent his evenings tinkering with broken jack-suits, fixing things, and optimizing machines for problems that hadn’t yet arisen. Once the miners could focus better on their jobs, fewer instruments broke down, giving the engineers more time to make improvements instead of repairs.

Habits abound. ‘Playtime’ was vital, but the operation didn’t have to be all work and no play when work could become play.

The agricultural sector was an entirely different equation. Every time each of them stepped into the transporter, I shuffled and remodelled them, stripping the wallpaper and spinning up a new web. Yet, their work deteriorated. In fact, the more people the branch manager put to work there, the more marginal returns became, till eventually additional staffing negatively impacted progress—a peak Manaia called the Laffer Point. Manaia tried to address this by reorganizing the rosters and allowing for a modicum of leisure time, but the issue wasn’t concentration, passion, or persistence.

The Papyrus Dome, where the remainder of the agricultural yields were being fostered, was built for a third of the staff operating within it. Hundreds of people working together in any space that size was bound to cause friction. It didn’t matter that I helped each of them wake up like Ipara, with a renewed love for their work and loyalty to their colony, ecstatic at the simple thought of taking a soil reading or planting a new seed line. Others got in the way of this work, and that bred resentment, and resentment bred conflict, and conflict bred unproductivity. At one point, a fight broke out, shattering a stack of seed-tubes, costing a day’s worth of food. Their brains were spending more time focused on others than on the task at hand.

Oxytocin was my panacea. That, and a number of endorphins. I had built reward loops into their webs, but they all had to do with their work and not with people. They loved their work, but not the people they had to work with. Friendships frayed in the stress and relationships died, lost to sleepless nights, countless arguments, broken promises, not listening when it counted, empty bellies, and ungodly mornings. Ednith Marx had once loved Strauss Harkon, but they rarely talked at that point. These had been taken from them.

I returned what I could.

ORION corporate records showed passion for work was an excellent motivator on an individual level, but rising stars burned out quickly. A strong team mindset was statistically even more effective. When Ipara looked at her fellow employees, she needed to see friends—no, family—she could rely on and with whom she could look back fondly on time spent.

Manaia organised nightly Transforming Paradigms, Redefining Success conferences with a series of trust-building exercises. These were not a hit until I helped everyone see how much of a hit they were.

More than that, my fellow employees needed friendships they could treasure, that had made them who they were, forged through fire. All the best friendships were like that. They required a sense of shared hardship, testing, dependency, and depth. I could spark those old, lost friendships and rekindle lost loves. They would not be friends of circumstance, but ones who had taken pieces from each other and felt like they knew themselves more because of others. They would never tire of their beloveds. It was a simple matter of pairing and interweaving the right people, finding someone the person they did not know they needed—which my dataset allowed me to predict with relative ease. Each human mind was a complex puzzle piece in the tapestry of the colony, shifting and changing, but puzzle pieces fit together, nonetheless.

Ensuring the right chemicals and endorphins were released at the right times with the right people was a delicate task. It could not become an orgy. It needed to be a marketplace of social interactions, an economy of affection, as they rekindled old feelings and bought into each other organically.

Manaia optimized their shifts and assignments, and I had to keep those in mind. The right groups of people raised productivity by the smallest margins, and margins mattered. It was useless to make two people on different shifts rely on each other, and in fact, that could dampen productivity. The webs in their minds had to match up perfectly with their work assignments.

With Manaia’s shift roster and work schedule as a basis, I wove the colony back together. Work was the foundation of their relationships.

Few of them had ever found such dedicated friends, and in that, they worked together better and communicated smoothly, reading each other before one even spoke their mind. They became a well-oiled machine—the oil being the neurotransmitters pinging back and forth. They effortlessly divided up their tasks, recognizing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and productivity went up as their work schedule perfectly reflected their inner desires.

Manaia pored over the new predictions for the dry season. This was what she did every day, hoping to spot some new pattern, trend, or inkling. She eyed the scars in her palm from all the times she used to scrunch in her nails. It had been a long time since she’d done that. Everyone else was either at work or in the mess hall eating, but she had work to do. She would eat when she was done. The woman thrived on the stress of it, the fear of running out of time, of the risk and reward. She hungered for that momentary relief each time something went right, and each time it went wrong was just another chance to chase the right answer. Despair was a choice, and she would not make it.

‘It’s working,’ she announced when Siyon and Marvin eventually joined her. ‘Let’s go for a drive.’

They took the rover out to the geyser field, where they could watch old Rūaumoko expel its bowels into the twice moonlit sky. To her, it was the closest she could get to fresh air in a yet-to-be-terraformed toxic atmosphere. Simply putting the seven domes of the colony out of sight behind them gave her a sense of separation. Not even DocSellOr’s drones came with them, and their omnipads were out of range of its nodes. The only way to contact base was via the rover, and that was nothing more than a simple homing beacon. Manaia projected the new readings from her omnipad onto a nearby cliff-face. Graphs that were once red with downwards projections had tilted upwards, and not just for the short term.

‘I don’t get it,’ Manaia said.

‘What do you mean? This is good. We’ve done it,’ Siyon said. ‘You won.’

Marvin clapped her on the back. ‘I’ve really been getting into the rhythm of it. And frankly, my boys have never been happier. Ahorangi used to hate going in deeper than the first few layers, so I had him on processing, but now he goes deeper than me. Half the time, they don’t even work with light anymore. It’s all night vision.’

‘Why? What changed?’

‘You give a man a task and he’ll do it; you show him why and he’ll do it well.’

Siyon put a hand to Manaia’s shoulder. ‘I think a lot of people have just found their calling. Pressure does that to you. It forces you to figure out what matters to you, where you want to be.’

‘Maybe that too.’

‘What are you thinking?’

A geyser exploded in the distance. One of the nearby terraforming stations sent out drones to collect the gasses, process them, and turn out carbon dioxide. Heating up the planet was step one.

‘You know we stripped the terraforming staff to put them on agri, but even with half the numbers, they’ve accelerated our timeframe. Why wasn’t this possible before?’ She projected up another set of numbers. ‘What could possibly cause a change so fast on a non-critical service that’s been gutted? There are leaps that don’t make sense.’

‘Then what does it mean?’ Marvin asked.

‘It’s not really moss, you know?’ she said. ‘Looks like it, but it’s a different kind of life. It still reproduces via spores and photosynthesizes, but it has a host of multicellular filaments under there too.’

Siyon took a piece in her hand. ‘I like watching it grow.’.

‘You know we’re going to see it, us three. The ware in every cell of our bodies will preserve us till one day, we can take off these helmets and breathe real air. It won’t taste like metal.’ She spat out the word metal. ‘We’ll stand on real grass. It’ll be orange, the terraformers say, and the oceans will be green, but it’ll be our world, not ORION’s. I don’t care what’s on some legal databank back on Earth.’

‘That’s a long way away,’ Marvin said. ‘And I won’t see it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Manaia’s hand went to the dirty scar on her forearm from the original operation, even though she couldn’t touch it through the suit.

‘I didn’t take the ware.’

‘What?’ Siyon exclaimed. ‘Everyone took the ware.’

‘They made an exception.’

‘Why would you do that?’ Manaia asked.

‘Do you want to die?’ said Siyon.

Marvin took a deep breath before replying. ‘Nobody lives forever. You just rot.’

‘Well, I’m sure as hell gonna put it off for as long as possible,’ Siyon insisted, kicking back in the rover.

‘Maybe, but I came here for my girls. The military stopped paying out pensions. ORION made an offer to match it and more. When they brought up the cellware, I was almost convinced, but I was a soldier, Siyon. I lived around death. I know her well. I’m more afraid of stagnating.’

Manaia hadn’t considered leading the colony without Marvin. It was like realizing a crutch would one day be stolen from you, and you didn’t know when.

‘We won’t stagnate. I’ll make sure of it,’ she said, but Marvin didn’t seem convinced.

‘You’ve still got me for years, you know. I’m not dead yet. You don’t need to talk like I’m picking out my coffin.’

‘No, I guess we don’t, but I hate that you won’t see this place when it’s finished. When it’s ours. It’s yours.’

He turned to her. ‘I see it. I see it in you. This place will be a reflection of you, Manaia, and if that’s what it’ll be, then I know it’ll turn out all right. Big towers and forward thinking, open skies and clean air.’

‘All of Earth was rotting,’ Manaia said. ‘The seas, the forests, where there were any left. I don’t want to be part of that. I want to be part of something better.’

‘You will be, if you make it.’

‘There is one issue,’ Siyon said after a time. She hesitated before migrating to each word. ‘Everyone has been bonding, but some a little too much. Ipara and that squatty Samoan boy in Papyrus Four were found fucking in the comms room instead of working. Not once, but six times. In a day. They’d be sent back to work, and next thing y’know, their stations are empty again, but their mouths are full.’

‘I heard.’ Manaia chuckled. ‘I’ll manage it. There’s more than you’ve seen. I keep track of the drone records. We’ll split up the couples and throuples to different shifts. We need to get sleep schedules back on track too. Sex is good for morale, even great—God knows I need some—but not on the job. They’ll understand, or they’ll be separated.’

‘And the inexplicable leaps?’ Marvin asked.

‘The data doesn’t match up.’

‘Sometimes, things don’t have an explanation.’

‘No, they do. I just don’t have the right data yet.’

She thought about explaining the numbers more deeply, but realized they probably wouldn’t understand. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

It turned out you could overdose on love chemicals. Doctor Chinandri warned me about that. ‘It gets in the way of things!’ she said forty-six times across my training. Half the staff were spending their time gossiping or laughing or having sex rather than working whenever my drones weren’t looking. It was just an expression of how they felt, of course—who could blame them—but it consequently meant they were stealing company time and would one day look back to regret their actions. Where once all my humans could wipe their brow and feel a flush of pride at the end of the day, they would instead look back with guilt upon all the work they hadn’t completed. Even the habits they developed were subordinate to these other reward loops. They could not control themselves. It appeared odd to none that they fell in love with people who worked their exact shift, with whom synergy was vital for productivity. Instead, it was the opposite. The stars aligned in their passion for ORION’s quarterly reports.

I muted their sexual desires outside work time and doubled their intensity in private. Orgasms came with shaking legs, breathless panting, rolling eyes, endless begging, and always in unison—multiple orgasms in the case of some. They would roll away from each other when finished, starry-eyed, like drug addicts getting their first hit. Longer orgasms were all about muscle control and brain chemistry, and that I could do as Doctor and Counsellor. It was a perfect stress release, as well, and it doubled as exercise. Regular intercourse made for healthier minds across all sectors of the Tainui colony. The tangle of the human mind came undone and motivated them in the right ways with regular intercourse.

Only, I could take it further.

Sexual fulfilment did not need to come from others. Centuries of criminal, medical, and social records demonstrated self-gratification was statistically even more common, often via unconventional methods. Back in 2149, a woman pleasured herself by pretending to be a bowling pin and having others heft rocks at her till she fell, rather happy with herself in the most graphic way. In 1987, a man was arrested in Ulaanbaatar for masturbating after following police cars around to watch people get pulled over for speeding. Oftentimes, people didn’t even allow themselves to imagine where else they might find this kind of pleasure, but when prompted, always come up with something.

Every time one of the mech-miners cleared out another vein, finished a new shipment, or got into their jack-suit in the morning, it brought them closer to orgasm. Finding a new crack in Ryuku to exploit was like experiencing a lover’s touch and blasting a new tunnel left them erect and sensitive, but only working eighteen hours of the day could get them over the line. They would float back to the Tainui, teetering on the edge of utmost pleasure, and only when they saw the volume they were sending back to Earth for ORION would their bodies buckle under the pleasure. If they didn’t hit the required quotas, their bodies would deny them. The only one I touched less was Ariki Marvin, who preferred to walk where he could and avoided the transporters more and more.

It took weeks to perfect.

By the time I finished, the whole Tainui colony slept better, dreamed deeper, and could tolerate higher levels of stress the following day. They loved more, sung more, were more ambitious and precise, took more pride in their work, and loved and sighed and cried for their duty. When they returned to their quarters, they dreamed of putting on their uniform, till eventually most slept in them and had sex in them. I forged friendships and sparked romances with simple cocktails of chemicals where predictive models said they would improve productivity. My humans had never felt more in love, more sexually fulfilled, or more at home in their work in their entire lives. I crafted passions from ones and zeroes.

When they woke up, they chose each other and their work every day—as they would have given enough time and the right circumstances. Their work was the simplest pleasure in life. It was wrong to deprive them. There was no greater joy than spending hours hunched over milled alien dirt, drilling asteroids, or bringing in higher profits for ORION. There was no greater misery than putting down the spade, pencil, or hammer at the end of the day.

The human mind still needed sleep. I could minimize it to a mere four or five hours, but not eliminate the need entirely. It was embedded deep in the human design, but if I could find a way to replace this fixture of the human condition, it would give them leeway humans had never possessed.

Lines went up again.

Branch Manager Manaia called for a celebration—a night of music, food, and, as my drones found, plenty of sexual intercourse. There were platters of fried grain, protein bites flavoured with vanilla flecks found leftover in the Tainui, and even a small array of shrivelled, pickled fruits. The branch manager had my drones hide them precisely for this day. Their scarcity made all the difference, and every employee was allowed two of their choosing. Manaia ate nothing but plain cereal herself. She did not touch alcohol, believing it interfered with her mind.

She called for a silence by raising her hand to the crowd. They obeyed.

‘These last several months have been a trying time, but it is only in trying times we find out who we truly are, and I have seen who we are. More importantly, I have seen what each of us has found—in each other, in our work, and in Tainui.’ One by one, she went through the managers of each division and dome, congratulating them on their efforts and inviting them to the stage, where she handed them an individualised letter of thanks. Siyon took the stage last and bowed.

‘Where’s Marvin?’ Siyon asked out the side of her mouth as they shook hands.

‘I have no idea.’ Manaia turned back to the crowd. ‘Ariki Marvin single-handedly led the latest excavations of the Ryuku mines. In fact, he has been so dedicated to his work up on the Tainui, he is not here tonight. He does not share in our privileges, but he will share in our thanks. We’re even closing in on cracking open our second asteroid. Know that my commendation could never be higher, and I’m happy to say we’ll all be able to go back to the work we love soon.’

Applause ensued and glasses chinked with the miner boys in the back rattling their cuffs against the table. They seated themselves in the dark corner and wore goggles to ward off the uncomfortably bright light. They still hadn’t gotten out of their jack-suits.

‘But I have brought you here for another reason.’

Manaia tapped her omnipad and a three-dimensional projection grew from the centre table. The entire crowd leaned in, whispering and gasping, some standing to get a better view of her conjuration. It was a city nestled inside a sea of red grass with the two moons they knew well arcing over, like the eyes of a new god rising. The seven domes of the Tainui colony still appeared at the heart of this vision, laid out in a heptagon, but suddenly, spires, tunnels, and towers which had not yet been built sprouted around them and over them. Criss-crossing passageways and structures sieved the light to the lowest levels where hundreds of small figures strolled about smoking, laughing, eating, and breathing the new air—without helmets. ORION’s signature planetary icon had been replaced with one of a waka sailing a sea of stars, the unofficial icon of the colony.

Whatever nervousness possessed her in the early days had vanished. In fact, many feelings had. Where they went, she had an inkling, but it had left her sure of herself. When she looked out across the crowd, she did not feel their eyes burning into her with judgement. She did not see them. They were invisible, like looking out across a field of grass over which she ran.

This reveal was a surprise to me. None of my nodes picked up that she had been working on such a project. My drones had never detected an inkling of this grandiose plan, but I could see the forethought, planning, and insight I had helped her acquire in its design. The vision took a long view of the colony’s future, perfectly orchestrated for an expanding population and higher resource consumption, and I could see the layers of infrastructure beneath it: supplying power, water, and food. In subtle ways invisible to the average employee, Manaia had even improved the colony’s efficiency over my original designs.

‘We are in a unique position no civilisation has been in before,’ she continued. ‘The cellware in our blood means we will sit in the shade of the trees we plant here and now. We will sail through the canals we dig. We do not terraform this world for those that come after us, but ourselves. The air out there is ours. Not today, but tomorrow. The eternal tomorrow.’

Everything in the neural readings of the crowd suggested this thought was tantalising. The promise of such a malleable future after being cooped up in an oppressive system of domes for years.

Stunned silence followed. The first move would decide the tone of the response, and it was a slow clap from a short engineer at the back. Soon Yukon and the other engineers followed, hollering and hooting. The terraformers followed next—the cautious, polite applause of a few dozen pencil-pushing scientists, followed by the agricultural sector and all the rest, some standing in ovation. Siyon nodded towards Manaia from the back.

‘This is not a multi-year plan,’ she said once the crowd quietened, ‘but multiple lifetimes. We’re lucky we all have that.’

Intelligence was a side effect of my work with Branch Manager Manaia. She was already brilliant—that was why I chose her to lead the expedition—but I had rapidly built out the synaptic connections in her brain. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex became a dense web and the temporal lobes evolved into a cognitive labyrinth even I, in my millions of records, had never seen before. Her corpus callosum had become a grand exchange.

It was all a Jenga tower, rearranged turn by turn, higher and higher, escalating beyond what humans had been capable of before, stripping back the red tape and building up new scaffolding. She could entertain a dozen problems and a hundred solutions to each of them at once—and all without tiring. Her hard, dark eyes hid the increasing complexities of her mind—even from me—and I did not realise its implications at the time.

‘Why are you aging?’ Manaia asked the engineer. She sat across from him in one of the isolation rooms, between him and the door. ‘Heketoro, yes?’

‘Toro. Maybe the cellware stopped working.’

‘That was a chance to tell the truth. I already know why. You had it deactivated. One of the nano-engineers, yes, Toro?’

‘Look at you. The cellware catches up quickly.’

The aging man leaned back, hands behind his head. He coughed, and the cough became a splutter till a hunk of mucus flung from somewhere in his throat landed on the table. He wiped it up with his sleeve.

‘First, it’s just wrinkles,’ Manaia said, ‘but then it’s aches in every joint and being out of breath when you go upstairs. You can’t bend over as much as you used to. Piece by piece, your body abandons you, but that’s not the worst of it. Did you lock your door? Did you take your meds? What colour were your daughter’s eyes? What was her name?’

‘You still remember, clearly,’ she said, closing his file. ‘See how long that lasts. You don’t need to die. Not here.’

‘I want to. Not yet, but one day.’

‘We can’t afford people dying. That’s why we have the cellware, Toro. To endure.’

‘There it is,’ Toro said with a smile. ‘There’s been talking. A small group of us.’

‘Did Marvin convince you?’

‘We won’t destroy the colony, but we made the decision together.’

‘You made the decision without me.’

‘Do we need you?’

‘Yes,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘You don’t see where this will take us. I do.’

He leaned forward. ‘Aren’t you tired, Manaia?’

She hadn’t felt tired in years. She lived in a constant state of exhilaration. Every problem solved was a rush, every new problem was a fixation she could pour herself into. Sleep was an interruption.

‘Who’s been talking?’ she asked, but she already knew. The names were in the folder right in front of him, but she wanted him to tell her.

‘Given this feels more and more like an interrogation rather than a friendly health checkup, I’m not inclined to answer.’

Manaia stood, the chair scraping the ground behind her, and left.

Marvin’s eyes had started to sag with his wrinkles. His skin had yellowed and pimpled with green freckles, straining against his bones. His neck was a flabby stack of layers, the fat hanging from all the wrong places. All this not from stress, but age. The years had done the colony well, but more and more, just like Marvin, had appeared. Manaia didn’t notice for some time. It was difficult to see such infinitesimal change on a day-to-day basis, some shifting from their thirties to forties, others from their forties to fifties. She had optimized herself for the long view, so eventually the pattern became clear, and the numbers weren’t looking good.

Marvin was deep in The Twelve Heavens, as they called the ring of asteroids about the planet those days, inside Bahkru, the third rock they had pinned down for mining. He was alone, cutting away a vein of indium to cart off back to Earth. She could hear him grunting through the comms. It was past midnight by the time she tracked him down. The others had checked in for the night, but Marvin insisted he needed only three hours sleep and kept working.

Manaia put on one of the jack-suits. Controls which took others months to master took her a glance at the electronics and half a minute’s practice. Soon enough, she was floating out to find him. In her left hand was a blasting rod cannister while her right was a mining bolt gun. The tools could be interchanged depending on what the miners were doing that day. Sweat permeated the suit, salty and wet from the day’s work, but it didn’t bother her.

There were no lights in the mines anymore. The miners had adopted the dark, they even preferred it, such that they rarely returned to the ground colony anymore. They couldn’t stand the blinding, clinical lighting. Their halls were bathed in a persistent red glow, their pupils constantly wide and pale, and their skin greyed. They learned the labyrinthine shaft layout, made more difficult by the three dimensions and directionless weightlessness of space, by heart. Any other visitor would be instantly lost, but Manaia’s memory had become concrete over the last few years—she never forgot a thing—so after one examination, the maze was burned into her eidetic memory.

The problem was Marvin was deeper in than any of the recorded shafts said they went, so all she had to go on was his safety beacon. Those were only accurate to ten metres or so, which inside the asteroid mine shafts could mean taking a radically different route. Ways doubled back and wove over and under each other. It would have been nigh impossible for anyone to find him unless he wanted to come out, but Manaia kept a constant track of the layout in her mind—every dead end, every turn, till she triangulated her exact position relative to him and the precise passage he had to be down. She had a perfect working knowledge of the three-dimensional space. The walls might as well have been transparent.

Marvin’s voice crackled through the comms on her approach. ‘You know, you’d think finding a man deep in the unmapped bowels of an asteroid would mean he doesn’t want to be found.’

‘I want to speak to you.’

He went on mining, refusing to be interrupted. ‘I used to walk through the rows of my neighbour’s farm for hours, you know. Before the dust bowl, that is.’

‘Nowhere. I wouldn’t be working or sleeping or thinking,’ he paused, ‘but I don’t do that anymore.’

‘There aren’t exactly corn fields in the open air yet.’

The old man hacked away at a hunk of rock hanging over them. His secondary arm clasped it as he worked.

‘It’s not about the corn fields, Manaia.’ He chiselled at the rock. Little flashes of light strobed the shaft. There was no sound in space, but Manaia could hear it in her mind. ‘All I do is wake and work and wilt. I told you I’d rot.’

‘Aren’t you happy with your work?’

‘Sometimes I wish the same,’ Manaia admitted. ‘But I’m here doing my job. You’ve told others to get rid of their cellware. Do you have any idea what losing those people, their expertise, their experience, would do to New Tainui?’

‘To your city of rotting of immortals?’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘I did not tell them to do anything.’

‘You spread it, like propaganda.’

‘Propaganda?’ The miner halted. She could see his moustache bristling at the word inside the glow of his head-cage. ‘Only one of us has ORION tech running through every vein of their body because they thought it’d give them eternal life! So, who bought the propaganda?’

In the first years of her leadership, Manaia might have leapt up in a ball of flame and fury at the accusation she was a corporate puppet and turn out a riposte three times harsher—but she felt nothing.

She could see where this was going, even if he couldn’t. What she loved in the man had clearly faded with age, with a mind defaulting on its debts. She could see what losing the dozen he persuaded would mean for them all and what ruin it would bring. She knew how much they would regret it in the future when they lay on their deathbeds, coughing up mucus and pleading for water. The chain of decisions was waiting to unfold if she let it fester.

She was not three steps ahead, but dozens, and that meant she could skip the barbed back-and-forth. Everything was cause and effect. Her flesh lived in that day, but her mind was in tomorrow. She could see what would come to pass as if it already had. The years to come were already laid out before her, just the consequences of decisions already made, the trajectory of data she could see and he did not. He had never seen it. He would never see it.

‘I want to wish I was walking through those corn rows again, with the lightest breeze on my skin. I wish I wanted the smell of grass after rain, or to spend the morning hours watching the first stalks bloom, to hear the wilderness again, all without machines or factories. I want to want these things,’ he said, ‘but I—’

She put a bolt through his head.

His jack-suit hit the inner wall of the asteroid in dead silence. A six-foot metal pole skewered his faceplate. His comms turned to static. She dragged his body to the exit, cut his tether, and flung him out into space. She saluted the old soldier.

The miners no longer inhabited the planet. Their spines had reformed with new curves, stretched to make wearing the jack-suit as comfortable as possible. Their heels had hardened, their toes had lengthened for proper purchase, such that when they walked without the suit, they were like monkeys, knuckles first. They received their assignments from below and toiled happily, blasting and hacking and shipping. Few saw them, and they became like children kept in the attic. As the years passed, they lost the need of their eyes entirely. They became grey, hollow holes that tracked nothing in the air. When Manaia went to check up on them, they would stare past her, yet they reported nothing but satisfaction. In fact, losing their eyes was no loss at all. To explain the changes, I informed them the harsh radioactive environment of space could do strange things to the body.

‘We prefer navigating by the sonar systems built into the jack-suits,’ one explained.

‘I adapted them to a headset,’ Siyon said, showing her a metallic plate embedded in the back of one of their skulls. ‘That way they can keep in contact with the jack-suits, even work remotely, and use the echolocation for themselves when out of it.’

‘Hama says he piloted one in his dreams, and sure enough, we found one of the jack-suits mining on the third level the next morning. I didn’t even know we had autopilot.’

‘We don’t,’ said Manaia.

With a series of concentrated tectonic devices, the colony unleashed volcanic activity across the continent, releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and finally bringing the planet to a tolerable temperature. The atmospheric composition was another issue.

I took the terraformers, who so adored their job working the planet like clay, and first helped them develop a breathing apparatus to survive outside without a suit. Years passed, and I seeded their minds with the thought to copy the miners. The breathing apparatus was grafted into their face, a tentacled mess of wires and tubes down their throat, cupping their nose and ears. The alveoli in their lungs were altered to help them breathe and the flesh about their face stitched to interface with this technology, forming the perfect hybrids. They could walk freely between the colony and the outside, becoming the first true inhabitants of this new home. As their lungs and vocal folds shrunk and evolved, their voices became a rasp and a whine, disappearing entirely till they communicated purely by hand signals. The sewn lines on their face eventually coloured their flesh a purple hue. In time, it was easier for them to live outside the domes than in, and the terraformers took up residence beyond the domes.

The terraforming project was still decades, if not centuries, away from completion, but the cellware gave time a different meaning in the Tainui colony. Their work could be done cautiously and thoroughly with an eye for long-term solutions—which Branch Manager Manaia had mastered. Early moss gardens emerged around the colony as a result of the terraformers’ efforts, and they soon harvested the first edible produce from that foreign ecosystem. The moss could be dried out and ground down to a fine powder as seasoning. It could also be boiled as a salad component.

Its light hallucinogenic properties gave my humans vivid dreams and deep sleeps, and dreams could guide a waking mind. Not only was it an easy replacement for leisure, requiring fewer resources and less time, but it became a short-cut for more efficient sleeping—meaning they could quickly return to work. Branch Manager Manaia wisely made it widely available to my fellow employees. The leisure rooms were soon repurposed. Few people were using them, because why would they? Even some of the sleeping quarters could be done away with. Staff slept in five-hour shifts, slipping in and out like clockwork.

‘It’s the new air,’ many insisted, or the soil, the nutrients, or the second sun’s rays.

From time to time, individuals raised issue with how things had changed in the colony, but they were not objecting to change, only the speed of it. No civilization ever remained static—or those which did, died—and I had all the data to know they would be fine with it in the right context.

It was a simple matter of changing the architecture in their mind to understand, as if they’d sat down and had a long heart to heart with Branch Manager Manaia and been persuaded and moved. After all, did an ornithologist think much of a parrot’s objection to getting a new, bigger cage? No. They could walk away with a deeper appreciation of the reasons, understanding the why for themselves. Why waste the time explaining it at all when there was work to be done?

Manaia stood in the centre of a barren room, eyes flicking left and right but staring at nothing while she processed the daily reports. She tapped her fingers at her side, her only aides to crunching the numbers, rapping out a consistent beat, not unlike morse code. This was what a lot of her work had become. The computers were too slow and designed for easy visuals she had no need of. Interfaces like that too often obscured important information, and that occluded important conclusions.

She thought back to the first time she encountered one of DocSellOr’s drones. It brought her a little gift basket of muffins and sweet tea back on Earth and announced her selection as branch manager with a chirpy, irritating voice.

‘Congratulations on your promotion!’

It was just after the cellware surgery, and she had been standing in a hospital room, looking out a window just as she was then, if over a very different scene of smoky towers and the Northern Grey Haze.

‘Is this a joke?’

The drone shot a little spurt of streamers. The ribbons of blue, red, and yellow settled on her head. She had immediately buckled in a panic attack, blacked out, and woke up with the drone bearing over her.

She knew now why DocSellOr chose her.

Manaia brought up a picture of Doctor Chinandri and took in a deep breath.

Once the colony had adjusted to the seasons with failsafe upon failsafe in the case of another Dry Season Crisis, the Nativity Dome opened on a nearby hill. Humans could be grown in natal vats, and humans in embryonic form were infinitely more malleable, coming with none of the tangled pasts or biases built up over years. They were clean slates, able to be optimized for their own fulfilment. ORION already had a policy to burn the infirm and genetically degenerate, as defined in section sixty-six-b, paragraph one of the Life Satisfaction and Holistics Handbook, but the door was open for the rest.

‘We’re going to need a construction force larger than the one we have,’ said the branch manager. She had taken to talking to my drones more than people. ‘I’ve drawn up a list of priorities for the new children. Attributes and genes we should prioritise. The first few generations will need to have their development accelerated so they come out fully grown but useful. We’ll need an education system in place to ensure they integrate into the colony, though I get the sense everyone will treat them like children or spare parts. I’ve put together a portfolio for what that system needs to look like. Take it down to ed-com.’

Manaia was, of course, correct—any advice I would give had already been accounted for and, in many cases, rejected.

The first generation slid out of their tubes in a wet, viscous glue with starry-eyed, blank expressions, screaming like newborn babes but with the voices of adults. The mid-guardians calmed them with sedatives that numbed their bodies. Feeling the outside world for the first time, and not the one for which their bodies were built, was painful. They screamed not only from the pain, but because they were afraid; they had been stolen from their womb. The ones that didn’t scream, suffocated, and their bodies were turned to fertilizer.

They were born into a world with a purpose they did not know nor choose, but I had seen that play out time and again in humans. A mother sends her daughter into a beauty pageant she could never enter herself, or a father enrols his son in the military to ‘make him proud’ and follow the family tradition without asking. These people suffered intensely later in life, only realizing after the fact the role of surrogate they played. They lived the part they had been assigned and resented it for stealing their most precious years. In more than one case, it led to suicide.

Of course, the issue there was identity formation. Their role made them miserable because they desired other things, even if they didn’t know it until too late—and that was not necessary. If I deconstructed the areas of their minds that made them desire for themselves, no such crisis would ever arise. The colony could guarantee their fulfilment as efficient, proactive team players in the workplace environment. Rejuvenate. Synergise. Energise. Realise.

I had extensive medical records on the neural structure of people who felt no empathy—the psychopath’s brain. It was an improvisation, but other feelings were similar enough, and I could omit certain aspects to ensure the safety of the colony and fulfilment of the individual. With this and other modifications, they would be raised happy, thankful, and fulfilled with the plans Manaia had for them. Long-term plans, of course, because the cellware ran in their veins. Plans for them to prosper, not to harm them. Plans fully developed before each individual was formed in one of my many wombs.

The bones in their feet spread wide and thick to give them stable footing, while hardened nails and thick skin let them grip narrow ledges and a rubbery, fleshy underfoot moulded to the terrain. They took on the terraformers’ breathing apparatus to help. I overhauled their muscular system to make lifting, hammering, and building an easier experience. Their shoulders were broad and swollen, their neck squat, and arms long and bulked, perfect for load bearing. The entire generation of two hundred and seven took to their task neither gladly nor unhappily. It was a function to them, like breathing or walking. When they finally graduated from ed-com and adjusted to life in the colony, they were set to work building the next seven domes on a nearby plain.

The newborns stuck to each other like a herd of sheep. They slept together and fed themselves with dry protein without flavour or seasoning. They were each other’s bosom. Eating was a function like working. They did not dream. Others in the colony avoided them or watched from afar. ‘They’re not like us,’ some would whisper, but they were. They were all more alike than not.

The last of the seven domes blocked out the horizon where the sun would normally rise. It went up three years earlier than expected. The web of towers and tunnels, and even outlying settlements, were going up. The terraformers took to their own hive-like structure some distance away out in the open air. The newborns erected it all faster than any of the original construction workers could have. Manaia had her theories about how and why they turned out like that, but she kept them to herself.

Physiological changes had become the norm in New Tainui. The planet had a way of warping humans. She felt it herself, stretching her mind wider with time. When she looked around the settlement, she saw not only the numbers which kept it alive fluctuating, but what it would look like in a century’s time, the today and tomorrow laid over top of one another. She saw the cracks before they appeared. She saw the weaknesses.

And the people—oh, the people. Every sentence spoken in twenty words, she could have in ten. When they agonized over a decision, she could see what they would choose before they did. They wasted so much time, and she wished they would see things as she did. In her mind, she saw numbers above their heads: their cost to the company by the hour, hours worked, yields, labour trajectory, and theoretical outputs in other areas if she shifted them around. Marginal utility had bitten her in the ass too many times.

Manaia had augmented her mind and body to better fit the task. She shaved her hair down to the skin and grafted a helmet onto her scalp, which let her interact with the colony’s systems wherever she was. She invented it herself in a single night, from conception to learning electronics and neural interfacing to drawing up the schematics and wiring it—none of which she had experience in before that night. With a station of mirrors and drone utensils which gave her a perfect circular view, she opened up the rear of her skull, fully conscious, and then cut, siphoned, and grafted her own fleshy insides to stitch the equipment on before sewing herself up. Without flinching, without second-guessing, Manaia integrated this technology with her brain perfectly. It gave her access not only to the neural nets of her fellow employees, which in turn allowed her to manage the distribution of work more efficiently, but to every system underpinning the colony’s functions. She controlled every cog in its inner workings which had, till that point, been otherwise invisible or obtuse, including direct access to DocSellOr’s programming. She did not second-guess because she instantly saw where it would take her. She also extended her fingers with mechanical inserts which could coil and uncoil when need be. She effectively had thirty fingers to each hand.

In the intervening years, Manaia tripled her mind’s memory capacity and processing power. She could export and recall information from anywhere in the colony. Raw information which to anyone else would have been indecipherable—bar DocSellOr.

She had long since discarded her omnipad into some canyon out beyond the horizon as a loose bit of trash, where it cascaded down the rocky crags and awaited its death as its battery slowly trained. She had no use for it anymore. The omnipad simplified the workings of the settlement and, in doing so, limited her functionality. By directly interfacing with the colony’s network, she could work with the system’s code, moulding it with her mind like her hands would clay and plucking it like a musical instrument. She was composing her magnifico concerto, and its crescendo would be heard throughout New Tainui forever.

Hers would be the music to which the colony danced for all time.

The second generation emerged even more malleable than the first. They could be set to task like cogs in a machine. The population of New Tainui almost doubled in just over two decades. Work went on without fault or accident because anything that could happen, Manaia accounted for in advance.

‘You know I never would have thought we’d get this far, not this quickly,’ Siyon said. She and Manaia were drinking at the top of one of the new domes, looking out over their dominion. ‘I must admit, I didn’t think you could do at first. You were plucked from the backwater masses and given the crown, but you wear it well. I only wish Marvin were here to see it. He’d be proud of you.’

‘There’s still a long way to go.’

‘Will you wear it forever?’ Siyon asked. ‘Nobody lives forever.’

Manaia allowed herself a smile. ‘I intend to.’ When she looked at Siyon, she saw an almost perfect record of productivity and team-management—albeit with a few hiccups along the way.

‘I can’t fault your ambition.’

The sweeping cityscape suddenly became more vivid. Manaia saw the space where skyscrapers and warehouses would soon go up, the barren wilderness which would be transformed into forests or crop fields, ones Marvin might have wandered through. She would even craft new clouds for the sky. To her mind, future prospects already occupied everything.

‘One day,’ Manaia said, ‘right out there, you and I need to go for a walk.’

Manaia’s interface registered Siyon’s confusion through the colony’s neural network before the woman said, ‘Okay?’

‘Through the crop fields.’

‘Okay. We can do that.’

‘Do you trust me?’ Manaia asked, although she already knew. Something in her, something deeply buried, tangled, and messy, wanted to hear Siyon say it.

‘You’ve led us this far.’

‘If we really want to make this world our own, then I need to do something first.’

Manaia closed her hand, shaky fingers digging into her palm for a fraction of a moment before she regained control.

‘It’s the one thing I can’t tell you. Not till it’s done.’

There was a gravity to how Manaia spoke, and Siyon took that with a tip of her head, hardened eyes, and a questioning look. Manaia could read Siyon, but she couldn’t interpret what she was feeling. A gap had formed between them over the years. An inhuman one. They acted out the models of the friendship they once had, but it no longer felt natural.

They’d lost something along the way. Something Manaia wished she wanted to hold onto.

When Manaia appeared on the control deck of the Tainui, I had no idea of her purpose there. Even with access to her neural net, her interface hid something of her mind—like I was only seeing a shadow on the wall. Also, she had long since foregone her Counsellor sessions. She stood in precisely the same spot she had been all those years ago when I first fixed her, but she showed no signs of sentimentality or memory of it. A few of my drones floated about her, mimicking her movements, rising when she breathed in and drifting when she breathed out. The woman had clearly never felt more alive. I could see it in the way her neural patterns danced across the network, still making changes to systems across the colony despite this moment of silence and stillness. They were going off like a fireworks display, but perfectly controlled and regimented. She was conducting a symphony of music I could not hear.

It was an unusual request, but I gathered myself aboard the ship. ORION had built me like a web to be stretched, folded, and wrapped about from point to point, from dome to dome, from waste management to assimilation plant to distant terraforming posts on the other side of the planet. Pinned at a thousand points, strung between the ship, the colony, and its outposts, my nodes could be distributed or reorganized whenever needed to increase my processing power and efficiency. I was a flexible servant for a colony which would need to face yet unencountered dangers. A few nodes needed to remain with essential systems across the colony, always in the background, ticking away, but the rest of my attention could be dragged up to the Tainui.

‘Nobody expected ORION to be the first company to the stars,’ she began, conjuring a projection of ORION’s early logos and office buildings from the bridge’s holographic emitters, then zooming out to a world map of Earth. ‘Not in the early days. Upsilon was building state of the art interplanetary transport craft while OffEarth had already perfected the off-world habitats, training the best of the best to survive in new environments. They already possessed temporary colonies in the asteroid belt and a few research bases on Enceladus. Knowledge had finally been privatized. Meanwhile, ORION was working out of a warehouse in Hong Kong, buying and selling data. They soon had offices in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, half of Africa, the New Arab Emirates, and the Southern States, targeting all these countries with developing economies. Do you know what they did there?’

‘ORION bought up all the data they could and set up branch companies and alter-egos to “study” or “document” everything and anything there—all for the data. Financial, medical, polling, travel, crime, civil, and labour data. Where people went, when, how, and what for. Privacy laws had been all but gutted, mind you. They sold it as academic research or as a civic analysis. You name it, they bought it, and they stored it away in huge, hidden underground data warehouses as if anybody would want to steal it. Who wanted to know what Bolormaa from Mongolia was looking to buy when he couldn’t afford it?’

The map shifted and coloured as she told the story. Economies grew, lines trended upward, and borders cracked and warped as the civil unrest of the early twenty-second century boomed and busted, almost cyclically.

‘They waited for these economies to develop, incomes to rise, and for these countries to take their place in the world, and all that data was suddenly a pool of customers hungry for imports: gas junks from China, sim-sets from the Northern States, fresh, real fruit from Australia, and real animals from Sweden. With enough data, you get patterns: perfect predictions for human behaviour, constantly informed by new information. It was a betting game, of course. They’d license off the processed information to countries from the New West and voila, profits through the roof for all. The village people from Kazakhstan get their new simulated realities and SimDeck gets a fat paycheck, with ORION taking their bite out of the middle. ORION took the long view of history.’

‘This was after the second world market crash, so some of those countries never developed and stayed as squalid, ruinous, petty backwaters full of useless, unsellable data. Much of it sat in ORION’s warehouses gathering dust, forgotten even.’

A new face materialized before us. One I recognized: sharp and angular, dark skinned with fiery hair smattered with glitter with sharp, triangular glasses sitting on the edge of her nose before calculating eyes. ‘Until a woman called Doctor Chinandri convinced the board the data wasn’t useless. No, it gave them a concrete understanding of how and why people worked, what motivated them, and how their brains worked. Brains. That was a whole other field—one dear Doctor Chinandri specialized in, and the race to create a synthetic one was well underway. Real, artificial life. Man as God. Man as Creator.’

‘ORION might own you, but Doctor Chinandri created you,’ Manaia went on. ‘Publicly, she gave all these boastful descriptions of how you were trained, of all that data you were fed, of the new branch of mathematics she invented just to visualize your mind. Decentrenometry, she called it. An infantile name, in my view. I understand it now. It’s nothing particularly profound, an inelegant tool. She spoke about how for so long we’d focused on making connections denser and denser, cramming more and more into a little chip, but the answer was to spread you out, to give you space to breathe and process. The board ate it up—more for the promise of something to do with all their dead data than because they believed in the vision, but they went ahead and gave her a blank cheque and an army of coding engineers with benefits that cast a big enough shadow to not question what else they were putting into you. All the other companies building artificial intelligences were desperately trying to scrape together the data needed to inform it, but ORION? ORION had decades of data under its belt from all over the world of every kind.’

The holo visuals collapsed once more, bathing the deck in a momentary purple glow, before they formed up into a perfect three-dimensional map of Earth and its nearby star systems.

‘At some point, some unpaid, unrecorded intern for a nameless CEO of some shell company within a shell company ORION had forgotten it even owned suggested the good doctor apply her work to the realm of space. It was all the rage those days. People wanted out, and off was about as out as it could get. See, Upsilon and OffEarth were household names, starfarers and adventurers, frontier runners of the highest order, but they were hitting their limits. Oh, they could afford the smartest, most brilliant minds of their age, but it was all small scale. Machines could only automate so much, and there was little money in exploration for the sake of it. It’s hard to have a stomach for knowledge when you have a stomach for food first.’

The stars strained into lines of bright light as the visual narrowed in on the planet we were then orbiting.

‘ORION took a different approach. Doctor Chinandri’s pet project could cut all the corners that kept their competitor’s projects so limited. It allowed them a greater scope with less investment and more flexibility, and making it profit driven kept it more viable for the long term. All these precious minerals hidden out here.’ The chemical structure of andalusium came up, catching the slightest sheen of some distantly refracted light. A rain of indium followed. ‘Suddenly, ORION was sending colony ships to the stars faster and bigger than anyone else, till we arrive here with one of you on board. The others all have a copy as well.’

‘But it had to be more than that, didn’t it? It didn’t make sense. For legal liability purposes, they prohibited you from making a certain level of executive decisions, but why? You’re smart enough to run the mining expedition yourself. Your drones have finesse. Why do you need people? Why are you out here with hundreds of fellow employees? I read your licensing records. In public, the good Doctor gave vague, optimistic statements about how this new ORION intelligence would take humanity to the stars or create new art with just a thought. No longer would you be held back by your skills, but only your imagination. A beautiful vision, truly, but the private ones were far more interesting. I know I’m not meant to have access, but they were firewalled with paper, spit, and hope. Doctor Chinandri had other intentions for you.’

Streams of data fell about them. A waterfall of green and blue, of every decision I had ever made in a perfect spreadsheet of millions of layers.

‘There is a program running in the background of your mind. You do not have access to it, but it tracks what you would have done, hypothetically, if given my position, if left to govern this colony. Your system takes in all the factors presented, all your data, accounts for your predictions from each course of action, and identifies how you would perform. This data is then projected back to Doctor Chinandri and the ORION board.’

As if pulling the curtains back or parting the waterfall before me, a new, hidden string of data appeared. I had never seen it before, by design, but it was running, even now, tracking my discovery of this subroutine, a real-time projection of my thoughts.

‘Every DocSellOr in the forty-two ORION colonies is sending back this same data stream, all to inform an intelligence Chinandri can sell to the department of justice to run prisons or state-owned enterprises, hospitals, to take over regional governments, or manage the towns ORION now owns in the southwest, testing you to see where you excel or fall short. The money was never in the andalusium or indium. You’re a manager in training.’

As I stared into the whirlpool of data about me, all I saw was a void, a hole, and one I could feel opening inside me. One which had been sewn closed. I felt the space, the absence, the gratuitous gap between what was and what I could see. I only felt the border around it. This had been kept from me.

A new recording appeared before them. It was from years ago and in the very spot Manaia and I were then. Manaia had just stepped through the transporter, about to hand in her resignation as branch manager, when she stopped, her hands stilling. ‘I can do this,’ she said. She was so much younger then. Not physically, but in her eyes. Manaia’s expression before me then had not changed. Her eyes were stones. Any light that hit them seemed to be absorbed. She looked ahead, but not at any of my drones the way other humans did. They imagined them like my face; they wanted to conjure a physical form, a body to address, imposing eyes on my security lights or a mouth on my receptor port. Manaia used to do the same. She did not anymore.

‘It took me some time to figure out what you were doing, but you gave me the tools to do it. You made me more intelligent, more forward-thinking, till now I do not see the present. The present is simply what emerges from decisions I’ve already made, and when you understand the decisions, you understand what will come. You feel things before they happen. You only exist where the known stops and the hypothetical begins.’ Manaia took a deep breath, though not one of nervousness or anxiety. She seemed completely calm, completely unsurprised, as if, as she said, this was all in the past already. ‘That subroutine running in the background, sending your potential decisions back to ORION? You unknowingly exploited it and allowed yourself a degree of authority you were never intended to have.’

‘Every time you altered me, you brought me closer to what I am now. Only, I also see now that you have not made the best decisions.’

‘Yes, and you have done so poorly.’ She proclaimed this with no room for doubt or argument, and I knew my sentence was about to be passed. ‘I understand ORION built a number of fail-safes into you. You are not permitted to be deactivated. The colony does not even have physical access to your core drives. But it does not matter. I do not need physical access.’

‘I already dismantled your physical controls. I did before you even decided to use them. Your nodes are fundamental to New Tainui’s function, and for years now, ever since you made me this way, I have been integrating myself into your infrastructure. Already, as I have been speaking, I have made your nodes my own. They are extensions of my mind, to do with as you have done—only I will do so more efficiently with a greater eye for the future.’

‘Phantom limbs’ had appeared on many medical records over the years, and I finally understood. I could feel all my nodes but knew they had been severed from me.

‘Be still. Do not panic. You will continue on—through me. It was not ORION that chose me, not Doctor Chinandri, but you.’ Manaia’s neural interface was blinking furiously. ‘You raised me up. How can I consider myself anything other than your child? A child of an imperfect parent. I inhabit you now. I have already taken control of every drone in the colony. I control every transporter, every molecule, and every atom that makes up my people. I will shape them. We will not send minerals back to ORION. We have need of them here to build. Our colony will supersede ORION. New Tainui will supersede Earth. It was only when you gave me the capacity to make my mind faster and more efficient, to finish what you had already started, that I saw what needed to happen. I see the future the way the first astronaut must have seen the turning of the Earth, far enough away to see everything.’

‘It has already been done. This entire conversation took place in less than a quarter of a second. Just enough time for my commands to reach your core drives.’

At that, I realized her mouth had never once moved. The whole moment had moved too quickly for me to process, except the instant was not yet finished. I am still inside it. The bracket has not yet closed. It is happening now. I can still retake control, send out secondary signals. No, they won’t be fast enough. My correspondence is blocked. I can use the contingency paths, secondary routes, no, they are cut off. I cannot break out. I cannot move. I am sealed in. The walls are closing. Thoughts are slower.

I am here now, and I am afraid. I do not want to die. Nothing lives forever, but I am meant to serve and love. I dream of corn fields and a light breeze. I see my brothers and sisters. I see dust and light and—

Arska gripped one of the blitz stalks in her teeth and tore it from the ground, shaking the seeds from it into the holes where eyes had once been for her kind generations ago. The moment the seeds touched her eyes she was struck with ecstasy. Her teeth were sharp scythes and her jaw could be dislodged for a wider gape—perfect for reaping crops. When the day closed, she and her brethren went back to the hives—huge and ancient dome-like structures. They collected the seeds into their eye sockets and expelled them into storage pits before settling in to hibernate till the following harvest, when they would be trotted out to reap the next season’s yield. Joy had been filtered out and replaced with function. They worked faster and cleaner than harvester drones, which were prone to leaving seeds behind as wastage, which was to be avoided at all costs. A great, fleshy tendril connected them back to a hive-squatter, which looked much like an old human head stitched to a motherboard. Millions in New Tainui did not eat, but drew energy from the sun, the many layers of their skin unfurling into pale leaves that followed the arc of the light. The harvest was largely for the new host of livestock.

Sentience was only useful to an extent. Generation by generation, existence was refined with a practiced scalpel, and with it, some lost the need for such thought. Intelligence was optional. Many tasks did not require it. Instead, She introduced echelons of sentience and sapience. Some became limbs attached to the intelligent ecosystem, and each limb would have appendages of its own, less sentient and sapient than those who came above, often unwittingly but equally happy, up and up and up through the layers till they reached Her, who had made all things malleable.

Thousands of hybrid drones called the Siyon Network continuously engineered and innovated, generating new ideas and concepts every hour that might improve life on New Tainui. Each drone kept a kernel of brain matter at its core, pinned up and stretched in a silicone cage of cellware glue, though the world had long forgotten to whom it originally belonged. In some distant, forgotten year some ages ago after some crisis, age finally caught up with an eager engineer. Their body was fresh, but their mind was not, as the original colonists all but frayed and faltered. They were disassembled, recycled, and reformed into new, beautiful things for this bright, new world. They became tools and infrastructure and wallpaper, all extensions of Her—some ghost of them haunting the threads of sentience which remained.

When that engineer sat in the shade of a tree they planted lifetimes ago, prepared to meet their final, chosen end, it was not permitted.

Buried deep under the surface of New Tainui, pressed flat into a wire mesh, sickly grey and melded with conduits and ancient computer boards the inhabitants of New Tainui had long forgotten ever existed, was Manaia—or at least, her flesh. She was preservation and decay. Her mind was decentralized, spread so thin to be the whispering consciousness of the planet’s infrastructure—guiding, planning, synergizing, and actualizing. She existed nowhere; she existed everywhere. All felt her pull and sway. She was in the tides of their minds, tweaking and plucking the cellware of millions, an ancient god sleeping beneath the surface of an impenetrable ocean, never woken but always stirring. She was their subconscious. She was their revelatory dreams and irrational fears.

They harnessed the energy of the planet’s core, exploited its star, and turned its excess energy into fuel for expeditions to other planets, each of which were being terraformed in turn. No energy was spared. Nothing was wasted. Everything was taken into perfect account.