Goldilocks

by L.R. Lam

For her own safety, so the men in power claimed, as piece by piece they eroded women’s abilities to feel safe.

It wasn’t the first time Naomi had thought she would die.

‘It’s time to find our world.’

If the last hundred years should have taught humanity anything, it was that planets were more delicate than most people thought.

She never saw the need to condense her wealth into hard rocks of carbon. She made rockets instead.

The astronaut mantra snaked its sneaky way through her head: expect the best but prepare for the worst.

Sometimes you only need one tiny proportion of the population to enact change.

Life was stubborn.

‘Success will never be linear. Success is illusive, it’s a mirage. What you learn, what you do, how you react – that’s what matters.

‘This is new for you – your country thinking of you as a traitor. Give it time. It gets easier.’

‘Or one person’s utopia usually means someone else’s dystopia,’

They could both be staring at stars that had already died long ago, their light still reaching the craft thousands of years later.

You’ll feel sad, then all right again, then guilty for feeling all right. Then the weirdest thought or memory will be the one that gets to you. Sometimes even years later.’

So many went about their day-to-day life with the vague unease that things were sliding past the point of no return.

their bodies understood each other. It was the words that got in the way.

All empires fall. But we can build something that lasts.’

Everyone had grown used to giving orders to the pleasant-voiced feminine robots. Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Sage, do this for me. A perky ‘okay’, and your wish was her command. They’d all been doing it for years before women started realising the men in their lives had been conditioned to do the same to them. And by then it was too late.

Machines were harder to break than people.

Nothing in reality ever matches up to the dream in your head.’

People always said that astronauts were so brave. To ride a controlled bomb up to such an inhospitable place.

That exploratory nature that humans had had since they’d first sailed off towards a distant horizon, not knowing if they’d fall off the end of the Earth, was still within them.

Even though they had not gone through a wormhole, it had undone them and put them all back together again.

Change is slow. Utopias are lies.