How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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.