When they recovered your body, you started to scream. The retrieval team, nonplussed, shoved you in a pod, slammed the sound shutters, and peeled off before the siren song of the Hive could claim another ship.

The first man who purchased me loved me like a rainstorm over the moors. And I loved him too—for that is what I was built to do—sublimely, splendidly, like the slanted golden rays of the misty evening love the dewy grass.

Twitter says that Los Angeles is gone. Twitter says that Seattle is gone. Twitter says that Las Vegas is gone, flattened, obliterated. A mushroom cloud billowing over a bloody crater in the earth.

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In the dream, there are too many stars in the sky. That is how Pir first knows that she is not home. A hot breeze grazes her cheek and brings the smell of sulfur and burning iron. Deep blue sand glitters and shifts underfoot as she walks towards firelight flickering between boulders the size of ships.

Just like her mother, Olia begins to hear the Voice when she is nineteen. She lies awake in her cot in the morning heat, scratchy wool sheet cast to the side, when the word wandering sounds like a small, clear bell in her mind. The Voice does not sound the way she expected it to; her mother describes the sounds of her ancestors as divine, woven from gold and seagrass. To her it sounds like a voice arising from the blacksmith’s steam, like a sword being forged.

The Andes stretched from horizon to horizon and from sea to sky, rocky slopes pristine, skyline unbroken but for a tall silver dome perched atop the tallest peak. Just adjacent, the rising red sun spilled down into the foothills, lending a nascent glow to the slender road which snaked up to meet it.

The gavel bangs and the career of Xuyang Shang--Dr. no more--comes to a decisive end. The jury votes unanimously to convict her on all charges: perjury, falsification of data, conduct unbecoming a government scientist, and a dozen lesser crimes, with sentencing to begin tomorrow.

The sky over Southampton was a velvet grey the day the Titanic set sail for its 35th maiden voyage. The magnificent ship towered over the port, dwarfing dinghies and freighters alike, and casting a deep shadow over the waiting crowd.

The orbital pod, from which trailed a long line of spacecars and jetcraft, hovered tenuously above the distant Earth. Its lone occupant, a pink-haired woman nude but for a brief wool undertunic and Federation-mandated nipple holo-blurs, sighed blandly as she dumped another puck of espresso in the vacu-trash and tamped fresh grounds into the next.

I remember when we were born. We were a dazzling radiance and we filled the entire universe when it was only the size of our living room. A quiet, marveling awareness thrummed across invisible strings, pleased to exist and aching with the newness of being.

The lines which describe M. Akkadian, whom I am here to interview, strike the eye as unnatural, dense ripples against the broad arcs of the sweeping landscape. There is no breeze inside this dome, but one seems to lift and caress the folds of thin fabric that envelope her head to foot as she crosses the dirty stripe of plastene that separates two long, green canals. Far overhead, this white sun of Wayside 366 can be seen through a thin film. There is no sky—yet—and the daylight stars twinkle in unfamiliar constellations.

“I began to have these dreams.”

“Describe the dreams.”

“I am small and cold and alone.” My lip trembles. “A… a great part of me is missing.”

“What is missing?”

Maryanne Knowles lives in New Haven, CT with her partners, and works as an assistant professor of molecular biology at Yale University. She was the president of the Nature Club from 2009-2010 and continues indulging her love for the outdoors through gardening and volunteering at Long Wharf Nature Preserve. “Yep, there’s an ‘s’ there,” she says.