She feels it catch, feels the suit inflate.

Oxygen at ten percent, says the hood.

Konstance, this is outrageously irresponsible behavior. You are jeopardizing everything.

The underside of the cot glows brighter as the mattress burns. The beam of the headlamp flickers through the smoke.

“Sybil, your prime directive is to protect the crew, isn’t it? Above all else?”

Sybil raises the lights in the ceiling to full brightness and Konstance squints into the glare. Her hands are lost in sleeves; her feet slide on the floor.

“It’s mutualism, right?” Konstance says. “The crew needs you and you need a crew.”

Please remove the cot frame so the fire beneath it can be extinguished.

“But without a crew—without me—you have no purpose, Sybil. This room is already so full of smoke that it is not possible for me to breathe. In a few minutes the hood I’m wearing will run out of oxygen. Then I will asphyxiate.”

Sybil’s voice deepens. Remove the cot immediately.

The falling droplets cloud the lens of her hood, and each time she tries to wipe it clean, she only smudges it further. Konstance shifts the book zipped inside her worksuit and picks up her hatchet.

Oxygen at nine percent, says the hood.

Green and orange flames are licking around the top of the cot now, and Sybil is mostly obscured behind smoke.

Please, Konstance. Her voice changes, softens, becomes a mimicry of Mother’s. You must not do this.

Konstance backs against the wall. The voice changes again, flows to a new gender. Listen, Zucchini, can you flip over the cot?

Hairs rise on the back of Konstance’s neck.

We must put out the fire immediately. Everything is in danger.

She can hear a hissing, something melting or boiling inside the mattress, and through the billowing smoke she can just glimpse the tower that is Sybil, sixteen feet tall, rippling with crimson light, and from her memory whispers Mrs. Chen: Every map ever drawn, every census ever taken, every book ever published…

For an instant, she hesitates. The images on the Atlas are decades old. What waits out there now, beyond the walls of the Argos? What if Sybil is the only other intelligence left? What is she risking?

Oxygen at eight percent, says the hood. Try to breathe more slowly.

She turns away from Sybil and holds her breath. In front of her, where a moment before there was only wall, the door to Vault One slides open.

TWENTY-TWO

WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE

IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU

SO DESPERATELY SEEK

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio X

Folio X is severely degraded. What happens next in Aethon’s tale has been long debated and need not be belabored here. Many argue this section belongs earlier in the tale, and points to a different conclusion, and that it’s not the translator’s job to speculate. Translation by Zeno Ninis.

the ewes lambing and the rain falling and the hills greening and the lambs being weaned and the ewes growing old and curmudgeonly and trusting only me. Why ·[did I leave?]·? Why this compulsion to be ·[elsewhere?]·, to constantly seek something new? Was hope a curse, ·[the last evil left in Pandora’s jar]·?

You fly all the way to the end of the stars, and all you want ·[to do is go home…]·

… creaking knees…

… mud and all…

My flock, some cheap wine, a bath, ·[that’s]· as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs. I opened ·[my beak and croaked, “In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom.”]·

The goddess straightened, ·[her head bumped a star, brought down a colossal hand, and afloat in the center of her lake-sized palm, there rested a single white rose.]·

IDAHO STATE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION

2021–2030

Seymour

It’s medium security, a campus of low beige buildings wrapped in a double layer of chainlink that could pass for a run-down community college. There’s a woodshop, a gym, a chapel, and a library populated with legal textbooks, dictionaries, and fantasy novels. The food is third-rate.

He spends every hour he can inside the computer lab. He has learned Excel, AutoCAD, Java, C++, and Python, taking comfort in the clear logic of code, input and output, instruction and command. Four times a day electronic chimes sound and he goes outside for a “movement” where he can peer through the fencing to a rising plain of cheatgrass and skeleton weed. The Owyhee Mountains shimmer in the distance. The only trees he sees are sixteen underwatered honey locusts huddled in the visitors’ parking lot, none taller than twelve feet.

His coveralls are denim; all the cells are singles. On the wall opposite his little window is a rectangle of painted cinderblock where men are allowed to post family snapshots, postcards, or art. Seymour’s is empty.

For the first several years, before she gets sick, Bunny visits when she can, riding the Greyhound three hours from Lakeport, then taking a cab to the prison, wearing a surgical mask, her eyes blinking at him across the table in the fluorescent lights.

Possum, are you listening?

Can you look at me?

Once a week she deposits five dollars into his prisoner account, and he spends it on 1.69-ounce packages of plain M&M’s from the vending machine.

Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, he’s back in the courtroom, the gazes of the children’s families like propane torches aimed at the back of his head. He could not look at Marian. Who made the PDF we found on your tablet? Why assume Bishop’s camp was real? Why assume the recruiter you messaged with was female, why assume she was your age, why assume she was human? Each question a needle into an overneedled heart.

Kidnapping, use of a weapon of mass destruction, attempted murder—he pled guilty to it all. The children’s librarian, Sharif, survived his wound, which helped. A buzz-cut prosecutor with a high-pitched voice argued for the death penalty; Seymour got forty to life instead.

* * *

One morning when he’s twenty-two, the chimes sound for the 10:31 movement, but the computer room supervisor asks Seymour and two other good behavior guys to stay put. Officers wheel in three free-standing terminals with trackballs mounted in front, and the assistant warden escorts in a severe-looking woman in a blazer and V-neck.

“As you likely know,” she says, speaking with zero inflection, “Ilium has been scanning the world’s surface with ever-advancing fidelity for years, assembling the most comprehensive map ever constructed, forty petabytes of data and counting.”

The supervisor plugs in the terminals and the Ilium logo spins on the screens as the terminals boot.

“You have been selected for a pilot program to review potentially undesirable items inside the raw image sets. Our algorithms flag hundreds of thousands of images per day and we don’t have the manpower to scan them all. Your task will be to verify whether or not these images are objectionable, and in the process enhance the machine learning. Either keep the flag up or take it down and move on.”

“Basically,” the assistant warden says, “a fancy steakhouse doesn’t want you to jump on Ilium Earth and find a homeless guy peeing in their doorway. If you see something on there that you wouldn’t want Grandma to see, leave the flag up, draw a circle around it, and the software will eliminate it. Got it?”