How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

My engineer father once told me that marriage and who you fall in love with are largely a matter of chance, chemicals, and how far you’re willing to drive.

When she was seven hundred years old, still a baby by world builder standards, I walked my daughter to the seed field where I had been designing Earth. Kids usually weren’t allowed in the fields until they had completed their apprenticeship in their second millennium, but I needed to show her; she needed to understand. We walked between the rows of giant spheres, some as big as moons, glowing with ribbons of light, as I told her stories about each one. The fields are where most of the advanced civilizations in the galaxy are born and, for all we know, every galaxy has a world builder planet orbiting just outside in the dark, utterly alone. At the time, our world was only a giant playground to her. I stood in front of a tiny blue seed and handed her a probability scope.

I remember holding the scope to the seed, helping Nuri carry its weight, adjusting the dials so she could see what might happen to Earth. Probability scopes are an important part of our technology—they’re like telescopes but fitted with lenses made from the jellylike remains of our ancestors. They allow us to see through reality based on the contents of each seed. My father used to say our planet and everyone on it was made of pure possibility and that’s what made us special, made us able to create, become anything we wanted.