Addison slammed her video comm screen shut. She couldn’t believe they’d gone with Coleman’s design for the keystone species on Fazeroth-7. His creation was so boring—yet another wolf analog. Even its adaptations for the planet’s excessive rainfall were uninteresting. He’d stolen the waterproofing mechanism from duck feathers and stuck it onto the animal’s fur. No elegance or imagination. Stupid Coleman and his stupid smug face.
Her pulse was pounding through her temples. Addison sighed loudly as she rested her head on her desk, trying to get a hold of herself. There was no way she could take a whole five years working on rodent species again. It had seemed like such a good idea when she’d chosen this specialty in college on Proxima Centauri-b. She’d spent four years accumulating a lot of student loan debt to go to the most elite terraforming school, the one based on the first-ever terraformed world, and this was what she got for it? Management clearly needed their heads evaluated—how could they not see that her talent was being completely wasted? Another terraforming cycle designing iterations on tiny fluffy bodies with long tails and big teeth would absolutely do her in.
“Not good news, I take it?” Mikael, her drone assistant, buzzed over to her desk, his spherical body bobbing up and down on his six propellers in a way that was entirely too perky for Addison’s mood.
Her voice was muffled by her long hair that spread around her on the desk, “They gave it to stupid Coleman and his ridiculous duck-wolves.” She knew she sounded like a petulant child, and she didn’t care.
“I was sure you had it this time. Your carnivorous giga beaver was a shoo-in for F-7’s swampy climate.” The little drone buzzed across her shoulder, his version of a hug, given that he lacked hands. The bots hadn’t been invented by humans—at least that was what they claimed. But galactic history was so long that their origin wasn’t quite clear. It was clear, however, that Mikael and his fellow bots were especially good at assisting in terraforming. Almost all of them seemed to work for one company or another. Mikael had been specially assigned to help her think through an organism’s entire genome in a way that a human brain didn’t have the working memory to handle, but he wasn’t programmed to automatically be sympathetic. The fact that he made this effort at understanding made her feel a little better. He frequently did things like this, which made it easier to remember that he was an autonomous being and not just a robot. Mikael had his own will and made his own choices. He could have chosen to work on anyone’s project; Bradley in plant engineering had been trying to entice Mik away for years. Addison secretly thought Mik kept working with her because he understood her true potential.
Addison leaned back into her desk chair. “There’s no one in this company with vision. What’s the point of being terraformers if we just keep making the same old Earth standards with slight modifications? No one’s built anything truly new in the last century and a half.” She spun her chair around to gesture at the portrait of her icon, Dr. Anna Boller. “Where are this century’s xenobots or photosynthetic arche-fish? We literally have the powers of creation, and we waste it building stupid generic mansions to spec for wealthy corporations.”
After another few minutes of ranting to Mikael, her anger had run itself out, leaving behind a sullen hopelessness. Mik turned back to setting up the frameworks for the rodent project—sigh—while she moodily poked through the messages in her inbox, opening one message after another without really doing anything. Her fake-productivity sunk to the low point of sorting through the folder where messages from recruiters were filtered to. She’d been with Fearless Interplanetary for almost 3 terraforming cycles now. Maybe it was time to move on to somewhere new, somewhere that would let her really explore what she could do.
Her attention snagged on one email with a promising subject line: “We’re Taking Creation in a Different Direction.” The message started by praising her work on Liptus-22. That was the one where she’d snuck the fluorescent rabbits past her supervisor (and been thoroughly reprimanded when it was discovered too late in the ecostabilization to be undone). Sure, it made them easier prey to the predators that had UV vision, but it also allowed the bunnies another method of communication in low-light conditions. She smiled at the memory of the faintly neon blue streaks bounding across L-22’s grassland biome. This recruiter clearly had good taste. The message continued:
We think you would be a great fit for the bioforming team on our newest project. It’s an exclusive group doing radical new things that could change the face not only of a world, but of terraforming as we know it. If you are interested in this offer, we invite you to schedule a tour of our facilities and see if your skillset and motives match with ours.
“Hey, Mik,” she called, “what do you think of this?” Even though Mikael was at the other side of the room studying their latest assignment, a small corner of his memory was always aware of her desktop display, so he would know what she was talking about without her having to explain.
He buzzed over to her desk. “Seems strange that they’re so cagey about the project. What could they possibly be doing that’s so revolutionary?”
“Ah, everyone in terraforming is cautious about their trade secrets.”
“But have you ever even heard of them? Galactic Innovators, Inc., isn’t showing up on any of my queries.”
Addison scanned the message again, but Mik was right: It listed no solid details about the company. True, head-hunters usually pushed the prestige of the company as part of the package, but was it really that unusual? “Maybe it’s a shell company. If they really are about to make a big move, it makes sense they wouldn’t want to reveal their hand.”
“Or maybe their work isn’t above board. Remember what happened to the TerraFirm team on Jackson-6?” The drone clicked disapprovingly.
“Those guys were idiots. They should have done the background research. If even one person had checked the planet’s registration, the whole bio-incompatibility disaster never would have happened.”
“I know you’d never be that careless.” Mikael bobbed in a figure eight, his gesture for equivocation. “Still, this one gives me a bad feeling.” Though drones couldn’t really have feelings, he tended to use that human expression for mysterious artifacts of the calculations that were his mental processes. Over the years, Addison had learned to rely on Mik’s hunches. They were usually right.
“Okay, fine,” she said, hitting the button to archive the message.
But she couldn’t archive it from her thoughts so easily. As she settled into the next four hours working with Mik on the outline for their new assignment, she couldn’t concentrate. By the end of the day, her brain was shot through with boredom, and all she had were months of fiddling with stupid little rodents to look forward to. The best she could hope for was to give her creation an interesting fur pattern or scale color when she was done, a constant reminder that management had given Coleman the real job which should have been hers. Her idea was better than his, and what’s more, she was better than him. She had an itch to just delete all of her files for the whole project and give a giant middle finger to the whole company as she stormed out of the building. But she was too rational to throw away her whole career. No company would hire her if she left like that.
That night, after too many drinks alone on her couch while staring bleakly into the inanity of some reality contest on the feeds, she filled out the application for the mystery company. Forget Mik and his feelings. She deserved better than what Fearless Interplanetary was offering. She hit send and drifted off to sleep, dreaming sweetly of the shocked look on her supervisor’s face when she turned in her notice.
The process for obtaining a tour and interview had gone much more rapidly than Addison had expected. Within three days, the company had sent her an encoded transport key which would take her from Fearless Interplanetary’s headquarters near the Narcissus galaxy to their local star system without revealing its location: paranoid, but within the normal range of paranoid for a terraforming company, she tried to convince herself. Addison stepped out of the transporter and into a sleek office built with glass and shiny metal on an orbiting station. The floor below her was clear, giving her a view of a planet below. A flashy move: they certainly weren’t afraid to do things their own way.
She paused for a moment, mesmerized by the gentle curve of the planet’s horizon. The land on the surface below was that particular shade of reddish gray of a rocky planet about halfway through its transition into a habitable class. The once barren iron-rich soil was almost finished absorbing the oxygen that had been created, finally allowing breathable air to begin building up. The light of the solar system’s star flashed off pools of water accumulating where the oceans were beginning to fill up as the company jumpstarted the planet’s water cycle. And at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere, she could just make out the thin frame of the man-made shell holding in the planet’s atmosphere. Judging from the state of things, they’d probably been working on this project for at least a couple of decades and were right on the verge of needing someone to begin the planning to bootstrap life from microbial to macro. Someone with her exact skills, she thought with satisfaction.
“Welcome, welcome!” A man in a nondescript suit with a smile that almost split his face in two stood up from his desk and approached her. She reached out to shake his hand, but he went with a bow instead, which she returned. After some pleasantries about the conditions at the transport hub and how the weather was where she lived, he led her over to a desk. “I’m afraid that before we can begin the tour, you’ll have to sign a rather lengthy non-disclosure agreement. Our backer is quite serious about privacy.”
Taking the tablet he pushed towards her, Addison scrolled quickly through the pages of small type. She was sure it was just like all the other NDAs she’d signed at other companies. Wait, was that section titled “Spiritual Disposition in Case of Accidental Death”? She tried to scroll back and find it, but it seemed to have disappeared in the sea of tiny print. Oh well, everyone knew NDAs were barely enforceable in most solar systems, so no reason to worry too much. She signed and dated, adding her terraforming license number at the bottom.
“Perfect, Ms. Fredrick,” said the man with the Cheshire grin. “Let’s start by showing you around the facilities.” The thin outline of a door appeared in the white wall behind him and slid open, disappearing seamlessly into the wall itself.
The man beckoned her to follow, and Addison did her best not to gawk at the museum-quality, larger-than-life displays that were clearly designed to impress. Play it cool. They were the ones who had reached out to her, not the other way around.
The white room didn’t have a glass floor like the lobby, instead opting for glass walls that gave a panoramic view of more of the planet’s surface. Dotted across the room were pedestals filled with informational displays about the various aspects of the terraforming process. Addison glimpsed holomodels of furry creatures at one display across the room, and she tried to analyze their nature so she’d be ready with clever questions when the tour came around to her specialty. Was that tail from a Sichuan jumping mouse or an Australian kultarr? And that bony structure on top of the head—it reminded her of a Parasaurolophus. Could it possibly be for echolocation? An interesting idea for a small mammal. Maybe they lived underground? Clearly, this company, whatever it was, was thinking beyond flashy fur patterns and unicorn horn nonsense. This job was looking better with each passing minute. If the benefits were halfway decent, she’d be a fool not to take it.
The man had been lecturing as they walked, but Addison only caught the last few words of his introduction. He paused, and she realized he was waiting for her response, so she went with something she thought fairly safe. “And where exactly is this planet?”
“Of course, even with the non-disclosure you signed, we can’t let you know exactly where this planet is. Our proprietor is very—”
“Private, yes, you mentioned that. Well then, what can you tell me about the project? It looks to be in the early stages of microbiome seeding. You’ve been working on it for, what, a couple of decades?”
“Oh, it’s been in the works for much longer than that. In fact, this planet is completely bespoke, the work of many lifetimes.”
A bespoke planet? Addison wasn’t familiar with the term, and her mind scrabbled for a possible interpretation. “You mean the planet itself is . . . manufactured?”
“Yes, exactly. Assembled from asteroids and other unformed matter in the area. Nothing less than complete creation from scratch, placed exactly in the ideal orbit around our star. I’m impressed that you grasped the concept. Many of our interviewees take some time to adjust to the idea, but that’s the kind of scale we work at here.”
Making a planet from scratch, well, it was unheard of. There was a reason terraformers started with a base planet, usually one with certain characteristics like a magnetic core or an atmosphere that gave you a head start on production. To actually gather matter together and begin the process of planetary formation manually—Addison had never even heard of anyone speculating about such a thing. The massive scale of the equipment needed to attempt it would put it beyond the reach of even the wealthiest megacorps or planetary empires she had worked with. She couldn’t wait to get Mikael calculating on exactly how it might be done. This company was clearly the Capability Brown of planetary construction. And she could get in on the ground floor!
Still hesitant to seem too eager, she tried to take his sales pitch down a peg. “It’s not actually from scratch though, right? You gathered the material from other places; you didn’t generate the elements from fusion yourselves?”
A frown broke through the man’s smile. If Addison had thought his face unsettling before, now he looked downright menacing. But the smile returned just as quickly, leaving only a crease across the man’s brow to hint at the fury beneath. “Of course, we do have to work with what we have. No sense in letting perfectly good matter go to waste. Now then, as you can see, at this point, we’ve got the seismic activity mostly settled to a manageable level, and water is beginning to precipitate out of the atmosphere. We have plans to begin seeding the ecosystem as soon as the weather patterns stabilize, probably in the next five years.”
The tour continued through the various displays in the room. The plant life had all been designed with maximal nutritional value as well as aesthetic beauty, yet all novel designs. Nothing looked like a direct rip-off of old Earth, which was difficult to pull off. The animals were unique as well, not just the usual remixes but several completely new concepts experimenting with different styles of symmetry and locomotion. It seemed pretty standard except for one detail that Addison couldn’t explain. The plants had been designed not to reproduce until a signal was received from the company’s base, which served as an artificial moon. It was the same with the animals. The little creatures she had observed from across the room were part of a vast web of species, but no individual could reproduce without an explicit input from the company.
“A question, Mr—” Addison realized that the man had never given her his name.
“Call me Smungblaze.” He punctuated his name with another unsettling grin. Was it her imagination, or were his teeth sharper than average? She had seen some people with those kinds of body-mods on dark corners of the net and on crime dramas, but never in real life. Maybe this whole thing had been a mistake. She wished that she had brought Mik with her. But seeing how this company was too paranoid to even tell her where they were located, she hadn’t even bothered to ask.
“Smungblaze.” Her mouth felt somehow wrong forming his name. “Doesn’t that kind of micromanagement defeat the point of terraforming? Isn’t the whole idea to bootstrap the ecosystem until it’s self-sustaining?”
“And exactly how did that work out for Earth? An out-of-control biosphere that had to regulate itself via a series of mass extinctions? And once humans got involved, evolution was far too slow to allow the pace of adaptation necessary to keep up, leading to total ecological meltdown. The terraforming innovations only barely happened in time to salvage what was left. No, no, no, with our method, we can easily adapt any organism to suit further developments through selective breeding.
“Besides, what’s the point of making a planet if you can’t get every detail perfect?” Smugblaze gestured to the displays around the room. “Nothing on this planet will happen by accident. There will be no overpopulation, no famine. All of our animals will be kept strictly under our control at all times. That way they can all live happy, fulfilling lives exactly as they were meant to.”
Somewhere in her gut, Addison felt there was something wrong with this argument, though she tried to shove it down. Terraforming projects were always somewhat ego-driven: Any corporation or group who thought they deserved their own custom planet had to have an inflated self-image. It sounded like a lot of extra work to manually control an entire planetary ecosystem, but then again, who cared if the boss was a bit over-the-top as long as the job paid well and she got to see what she could really do when given free rein on a project?
That brought another question to mind. She turned around the room, noting that most of the biological niches seemed to be filled. “It seems like the job of mapping out the ecosystems is mostly done. What project are you hiring for?”
“Oh, I’ll leave that reveal for our CEO. He’s anxious to meet you.”
The CEO was interviewing her personally? She barely had time to think over what this could mean when Smungblaze turned and glided across the floor of the display room as effortlessly as a lion stalking through the savannah. Addison almost had to jog to keep up with him as he headed down a hallway towards the large set of double doors. The large brass doors screamed executive with ornate engravings of what looked like a garden filled with old Earth standard plants and animals. Crossing the center of the doors was a large apple tree, laden with fruit. Strange for someone so forward-thinking to be so nostalgic for Earthtimes.
Smungblaze pushed open one of the doors and gestured for her to make her way inside. Addison stood to the side waiting for him to follow, but instead he gave her a little wave and one last grin and let the door swing shut behind her. She almost thought she heard a lock clicking behind her, but that must just have been her nerves causing her imagination to go into overdrive.
The room was as brightly lit as the one before it, but with a dark inlaid wood floor and red curtains surrounding the large window on one wall looking down on the partially completed planet. The room felt a little warmer than she was comfortable with, but maybe the boss was adjusted to a tropical climate.
“Come in, come in, Ms. Fredrick. I’m so delighted to meet you.” A handsome man with dark hair that looked frozen with layers of hairspray sat behind the desk which somehow projected the idea of a throne. Nothing else to do but go forward. She approached the man with what she hoped was a confident walk. Remembering Smungblaze’s greeting, she attempted a courteous bow before she sat in the chair in front of the desk.
“Ms. Fredrick, may I call you Addison?” His smile was refreshingly warm. “I’m so glad you replied to our recruitment email. I’d heard of your designs and hoped you’d reach out.”
He had heard of her designs? Well, of course he had. She did make the best rodents in the industry. It made sense that someone had finally started noticing. “Thank you, sir. It’s been so interesting to see the radical designs you’re working on here.”
“I knew you’d be interested in them, Addison. You’re someone with obvious visionary taste. I hope you’ll decide to contribute your talents to our efforts.”
Is he offering me the job already? Though she was more than ready to see the back of Fearless Interplanetary, there was something fishy about his eagerness. “And what is it you’re needing designs for?”
“Did Smungblaze not tell you? He’s always too secretive about these things.” The man fixed her with an intense gaze, and she noticed for the first time the strange amber color of his eyes. “The project I need you to design is only the crowning jewel of our whole custom world, the pinnacle of the ecosystem, the caretakers of my garden: Homo Nonculpa. Perfected man, you might say.”
Enhanced humans. Addison nearly swore under her breath. Of course, there had to be a catch. Mikael would be insufferable when he found out he’d been right. Body-mods were one thing, riding the limits between edgy and illegal, but altering human genetics had been banned hundreds of years ago. There were a few less-ethical terraforming companies who skirted the guidelines, fudging things just a bit, making the future planet’s residents slightly taller, smarter, or more beautiful, never enough for a regulator to prove anything more than lucky chance. From the whispers she’d heard at professional conferences, it took a good amount of skill to get away with. And if you were caught, the whole planet would be razed from orbit and you’d never work with anything more technologically advanced than a basic calculator again.
No wonder this whole company was so secretive. This planet must be far enough out that they were hoping to go completely unnoticed by regulators. Was that even possible? She should run far, far away from this job. Mikael would tell her to.
But to be the first person in decades to really see what could be done with human genetics—
Was she really considering this?
In her mind came Coleman’s smug face presenting his boring duck-wolves while she was stuck tinkering with rats for the next five years. She gritted her teeth and ignored the sinking feeling in her stomach. No harm in finding out what exactly he wanted. She could always say no.
“What kind of modifications did you have in mind?”
“Of course beauty and health enhancements, but those are trivial. The main thing we want is to add some extra instincts. Things that would help everyone be happier. Adding inhibitions for certain things, encouraging others.” He steepled his hands and paused meaningfully, pointing his fingers towards her. “Is that the sort of thing you could handle?”
She bit her lip. “I think so.” Behavioral encoding was much more difficult than anatomic features, but she had never backed away from a challenge. “Like what kinds of things did you have in mind?”
“Oh, you know, no lying, cheating, stealing, I’ll get you the full list.” He smiled at her with a dazzling set of white teeth. “And there’s one more thing. A back door.”
“A back door?” Her stomach started to feel a little sick. Was it getting hotter in here?
“Well, you terraformers make bacteria with a self-destruct key so you can get rid of them once they’re finished with their job, or in case they get out of hand. This would be something similar, but it would allow our engineers to . . . assist the human if something went wrong.”
Suddenly the bright white walls and red curtains felt both too sterile and too hostile. Addison tried not to stutter, tried to play it cool. “I don’t know. I might need some time to think it over.” She stood up from the desk to make an escape, but the handsome man did the same.
“You understand we’d be doing it for the benefit of the humans involved. Their lives will be perfect. No wars, no heartache, no mistakes. It would all be so much easier for them.”
He walked slowly around the desk as he talked, and Addison had the irrational sense that he was cutting her off from the exit. Ignoring how stupid she probably looked, she sprinted towards the giant copper door, but the handle wouldn’t turn. She rattled its metal frame, but it held firm. The man was still pacing after her, with the deliberation of a predator who knows its prey can go nowhere.
“Come now, you haven’t had time to consider yet.”
Abruptly the door came free and swung open. Addison lunged for the outside, only to be confronted with Smungblaze. She saw new meaning in his predatory smile as he walked toward her, herding her back into the room. “Now, Ms. Fredrick, we can’t just let you go. It was all in the documents you signed.”
“What? What are you going to—You can’t just—” Addison’s brain scrambled for purchase as she tried to stay out of reach of the two men as they slowly circled her.
“I think you’ll find we can,” said the CEO. “Now be reasonable, Addison. There’s still time to consider the possibilities of this job. We’d hate to waste someone like you.” The two men started to close in on her, and she found herself backed against the window. Were those claws sprouting from their hands?
Addison thought she heard a thud which seemed to come from behind her, though that was impossible since only the void of space lay beyond.
The windowpane exploded outward.
The sound of shattering was immediately swallowed by the rush of air exiting the room. Addison’s feet lifted off the floor as she was sucked towards the window. A sharp stab when a piece of the broken wall pierced her side as she flew past the frame and into the darkness beyond.
Her body rushed through the void, but time seemed to slow down. The partly terraformed planet stared up accusingly from below her.
She should have listened to Mik. She never should have come here.
This was it; this was how she was going to die.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a round metal body with fan blades, not whirring but motionless in the vacuum.
Mikael?
Was she hallucinating?
Her vision started to dim.
The shimmer of a force field going up. A hiss as air rushed into the pocket Mikael had created. Addison gasped for breath, but her chest screamed with pain and she was barely able to get a small gulp. She felt disconnected from her body. Something was very wrong. The strange weightless sensation of floating inside the bubble didn’t help. She looked up and saw Mikael, haloed in the light of the planet’s star. His propellers began to change, elongating slowly until they flapped elegantly, six long wings against the vacuum of space.
“Mikael! You’re beautiful!” she whispered. “I should have . . . ” A wave of thrumming pain from her side made her lose track of the thought.
“It took forever to crack the cypher on that transport token,” Mik said. “We would have been faster if you had told me where you were going, but that hardly matters now.” Beyond Mik’s head, she thought she saw dozens, no, hundreds of gracefully elongated wings. More bots flying into the wreck of the terraforming station.
No, not bots. They were—
Her mind grasped through a growing fog but couldn’t find the word.
Addison saw Mik scan her wound. But he didn’t launch into first aid mode. The implied prognosis crashed over her like a wave.
“What was—” She struggled to get the words out as things started to feel more and more unreal and disconnected.
Mik paused as if calculating, and then finally relented. “They are the reason that my kind have been assigned to supervise you humans messing around with the tools of creation. They’re always looking for a way around the natural order of things.”
“They? You knew about them? Who—”
“Rest now. You’ll understand everything soon enough.” Mik buzzed down by her shoulder, his large wings enveloping her, cradling her. Addison let Mik’s words wash over her as her mind fell into the fog. “This is my fault. I tried to guide you, but I’ve never been as good at this as some of the others. I was never able to get through your own self-absorption to help you see the larger potential of what you could do. Still, you led us to their hiding spot. We’ve been trying to locate this faction for millennia. Maybe that will help your case in the hereafter—”
With much difficulty, she turned her head towards the planet where new life was forming. Years of terraforming had numbed her to the miracle of it. She watched the drift of clouds passing across the newly created seas until they were gone.
Liz Busby is a writer of speculative fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and literary criticism. She is the editor of Further Light, a magazine of LDS-themed science fiction and fantasy.
Art by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827–1895).
