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It’s difficult to assign value to discovery when you haven’t sorted out the parameters of reality yet.
Habitable exoplanets may have been lost on me then, but metamorphosis never was. It has always been a thing of beauty to me, the fluidity of form.
Torpor slows you down, and interstellar travel at half the speed of light further stalls the clock, but neither presses pause entirely. Cells divide and the heart keeps beating. We buy ourselves time while in torpor, not immortality.
I’m an observer, not a conqueror. I have no interest in changing other worlds to suit me. I choose the lighter touch: changing myself to suit them.
When the world you know is out of reach, nothing is more welcome than a measurable reminder that it still exists.
It’s understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you’re stuck on – those most vital criteria of home and health and safety – remain unanswered?
Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence.
The amount a person can spare is relative; the value of generosity is not.
Viewed in this way, you can never again see a tree as a single entity, despite its visual dominance. It towers. It’s impressive. But in the end, it’s a fragile endeavour that can only stand thanks to the contributions of many. We celebrate the tree that stretches to the sky, but it is the ground we should ultimately thank.
A return to Earth is a key component of all the Lawki missions. OCA was vehemently opposed to putting people aboard a one-way flight. Our mission is to catalogue, not to colonise. Returning to the world you’d laboured to gather knowledge for is psychologically vital. You had to remember who you were doing the work for. You had to know the finite spacecraft that carried you would not be your final home. Without a restful full-circle ending awaiting you, an astronaut under duress might decide to cut the cord, to make a home on a world that was not theirs. Lawki 6 would return to Earth, our
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At some point, you have to accept the fact that any movement creates waves, and the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing.
Jack gave me a thumbs up from where he lay. Whether this meant yes or I do now was anyone’s guess, but ultimately immaterial.
Chikondi’s not interested in sex – with me or anyone else – but when he comes to my cabin to talk, we engage in another kind of sharing, one that’s every bit as good and every bit as intimate.
‘I miss my father making it in the mornings when I lived at home. Everybody else drank it – my mother, my brothers. I don’t miss drinking it. I miss it being around. I miss the sorts of gatherings that call for coffee.’
Jack’s patches perform double-duty as well, providing him with the testosterone he’s received since his – as he calls it – second puberty.
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s often misused, operating on the false interpretation that fit means physically fit, therefore expressing a dog-eat-dog ethos. The strongest wins the day. But that’s not what Darwin meant, not at all. He meant most suited to, as in, the creatures most suited to – or most fit for – a specific environment are the ones with the best chance of passing on their genes. A sloth is fit for a slow life in the branches.
It was not a cosy storm, a curl-up-with-a-book-and-a-blanket storm. This was weather that resented us.
couldn’t cosy up in the future. The present was far too loud.
strange part of me wanted to find something wrong, something that would tell Elena her gut feeling had been right, something was amiss, but hey, our diligence paid off. We solved a problem before it happened. We prevented catastrophe. Instead, we found nothing. Again. The more nothing we found, the less she trusted
Our species evolved for a world that spins. The lengthy days and nights of our planet’s poles prove challenging for our diurnal minds, inviting summer insomnia and winter depression.
But I’m not a moth. I’m human. And in humans, there are far more stages than just two. I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself.
When I looked out at Votum, at that vast, echoing flatland, I saw exactly what my soul had longed for. A quiet place. A blank slate. A reality in which everything held still for however long I needed it to. If things moved, it would be because I moved, because I chose to move. It was not exciting, but neither was it frightening.
It was not compelling, but neither was it overwhelming.
a home can only exist in a moment. Something both found and made. Always temporary, in the grand scheme of things, but vital all the same.
