The shuttle banked east over the Santa Ana Mountains, and Remy Mercer got his first look at Irvine from six thousand feet. It was the best way to see a city that had been designed not to be understood from the ground.
It spread in every direction with the calm of something that had always been there: glass towers catching the late sun, solar panels on every roof, and above all of it the vertical farms. Three of them, maybe four, their windows glowing floor by floor in slow programmed colors as the growing systems tuned the light for whatever crop was up that week. Remy had read that each tower fed about forty thousand people. Four towers, one city. He’d done the math on the flight. It mostly checked out.
He had grown up with towers like these on the Seattle skyline and had eaten their lettuce his whole life. He still found them a little miraculous. That made him old-fashioned, at twenty-one. For kids five years younger, the miracle was already wallpaper.
Below the shuttle, a pair of air taxis crossed the freeway in the other direction, white and long-winged, each lifting on a dozen small rotors before the front ones tilted forward and they slid into flight like birds that had decided to stop flapping. Remy watched them the way other people watched dogs in a park. Twelve rotors meant twelve chances for one to fail and the other eleven to land you anyway. And they were nearly silent. On the ground you’d hear less than a conversation. He’d built drones louder than that in his dorm room.
He looked up at the overhead bin, where his drone case was wedged between a businessman’s roller bag and a surfboard someone had decided counted as carry-on. The case had survived six flights. He checked it was still there anyway. Racing had taught him that: confirm the things that matter before the things that don’t.
ATLAS spoke softly in his ear.
“Landing in fourteen minutes. Campus is twenty-three minutes by self-drive. Your pod check-in closes at eight.”
“I know,” Remy said.
“You said that last time and were thirty seconds late.”
“That was a different situation.”
“It was the same situation. You stopped to look at the drone relay display in the terminal.”
Remy didn’t answer. The businessman next to him kept typing, politely pretending not to listen. Nobody found it strange anymore when someone argued with the voice in their ear. Everyone had one. They came with your phone plan and lived in an earpiece, or a bracelet, or a pendant clipped to a collar. The basic ones were good. The basic ones were so good that most people never noticed what they didn’t have.
Remy’s was not a basic one. He’d built it. That was a longer story, and ATLAS would have told him he didn’t have time for it.
“Also,” ATLAS added, “there are four air taxis inside two kilometers of this shuttle, and you have looked at every one of them. The terminal has an observation deck. I’m mentioning it so that you can decide not to go there.”
“Noted.”
“You say ‘noted’ when you mean ‘probably.’”
He smiled at the window and didn’t argue, because it was right.
The car from the airport drove itself, which was normal now. Hardly anyone in a city owned a car anymore; the insurance math had killed private ownership somewhere in the late twenties, and you called a vehicle the way you’d once called an elevator. The roads had grown narrower because machines didn’t need room for human mistakes. The parking garages had become parks. Remy liked that about the newer cities. You could read the arrival of the machines in the shape of the streets.
The campus approach had no traffic lights. The cars merged into the entry lanes in a smooth, unbroken weave, each one finding its slot without ever stopping. It looked effortless. Remy knew how much engineering it took to make something look effortless, and he watched the whole intersection like a magic trick he intended to figure out later.
The Nexus Prime campus was not a campus. It was a city.
It had residential towers, dining halls, a medical clinic, a childcare center, a gym, three entertainment venues, two shopping concourses, an evening workshop space that taught everything from industrial design to Korean cooking, and a park at the center with real grass and two old oak trees that had been moved there at enormous expense. Nexus Prime owned all of it. Employees who lived here paid about forty percent of market rent, taken out of their paychecks in a way that was carefully designed to feel generous.
The company gave you everything: food, health care, child care, entertainment, a social life. A Homekeeper Pro for your apartment at half the normal lease price. Plenty of long-term staff left campus once a week. Some left once a month. There was rarely a reason to go.
Remy understood the idea behind it. A company that pays you well has a claim on your time. A company that houses you, feeds you, raises your kids and plans your weekends has a claim on the rest of you. Most people here understood that too, somewhere, and had decided the trade was worth it.
He noticed the grass as he came through the main gate. Real grass. It cost more and was harder to keep alive than the synthetic kind. Somebody had made a choice.
He filed it.
The Selene Commerce Initiative cohort had its own briefing at two o’clock on arrival day.
The general orientation was for everyone else and ran the next morning. This was a smaller room with twelve seats, and Remy could tell that every person who walked in had done the same arithmetic on the way: being in this room meant something.
About fifteen thousand people had applied. ATLAS had found the figure in a footnote of a filing Nexus Prime had made with the lunar development council. Two hundred had made it to interviews with actual humans. Twelve had received offers. Remy was the eleventh to accept.
The twelfth seat was empty. That was how he found out someone was still traveling.
There were three other names on his pod list: P. Nair, M. Santos, Z. Al-Rashid. The last one had a travel-delay note on her profile.
The briefing ran forty minutes. The woman giving it clearly knew every technical detail of the program and had opinions about all of them that she was paid not to share. She explained the structure: a one-year placement, an evaluation at eleven months, and an open-ended job offer for anyone who cleared the bar. She didn’t say where the bar was. Nobody asked.
What she did say, near the end, was the part Remy had come for. The program fed people to the Moon. Not all of them, and not soon, and not guaranteed. But the Selene crews were drawn from the people Nexus already trusted, and this was the room where it started.
He wrote nothing down. He didn’t need to.
Pod 7 was on the twelfth floor of Building C. Remy took the bed under the window and slid his drone case under the desk before his duffel was even on the mattress. That was the correct order.
The main room had four beds, two along each side wall. Each had a nightstand and a narrow desk, and the desks faced the walls, so four people could work without staring at each other. Whoever designed it had understood that this was a kindness. At the near end the room opened into a kitchenette with a counter, a sink, an induction plate, a small refrigerator, and a table with five chairs, because somebody in facilities believed in guests.
The wall above the table was blank, white, and slightly glossy. Remy knew a display surface when he saw one. Every wall in the building could probably show a movie if you asked it nicely.
And in the corner, backed into a slim charging dock at the base of the wall, stood the Homekeeper.
He had seen a thousand pictures and never stood next to one. It was about as tall as his shoulder, white, with a smooth human-shaped upper body and two slender arms that ended in jointed five-fingered hands. It rode on a low skirted base with four small powered wheels tucked underneath. Its head was a rounded block with a dark glass visor across the front, and behind the visor sat three lenses side by side. On each side of the head was a small grille, like the suggestion of an ear. A thin status light glowed green at its collar.
It was a standard Gen 3, the facilities model: the same body as the Pro but run from the company cloud, not allowed to learn the people it lived with. It would clean, restock, and fetch. It would not get to know you.
It turned its visor toward him when he came in, then turned back, the way a polite stranger looks up when you enter a waiting room.
“Hello,” Remy said, before he could stop himself.
The status light pulsed once. That was all.
P. Nair arrived twenty minutes later.
She came in with a bag over each shoulder, scanned the room in about four seconds, and put her things on the bed across from his without asking whose it was. She looked at the kitchen. She looked at Remy.
“Has anyone cleaned in here?”
“I got here twenty minutes ago,” Remy said.
“That’s not a no.”
She opened every cabinet, which took forty-five seconds, and whatever she found confirmed her suspicions. From the smaller bag she produced cleaning supplies. She had packed cleaning supplies in her carry-on. Then, from the same bag, came something that surprised him more: a small cloth roll that unfolded into a row of tiny sealed jars. Mustard seed. Curry leaves, dried. Something dark red he didn’t recognize.
“You brought spices,” he said.
“The commissary food is fine.” She lined the jars up along the back of the counter like instruments. “Fine is not the same as food.”
“Where’d you learn to cook?”
“My father’s restaurant.” She said it while wiping the induction plate, without looking up. “In Bengaluru. He opened it when he didn’t have to work anymore. He says it’s the only job he ever chose.”
Remy filed that too. It seemed important in a way he couldn’t name yet.
He went back to the project brief on his tablet.
“You’re reading the brief,” she said from the kitchen.
“Yes.”
“There are two errors in the atmosphere section. The thermal model doesn’t account for the disturbance windows after a solar storm.”
He had one of the errors. He didn’t have the other. “What’s the second?”
“The relay spacing uses signal loss measured at ground level. It should be averaged up through the whole column of air the signal crosses. At altitude, that’s eight percent.”
He checked. She was right.
“Priya Nair,” ATLAS said quietly in his ear, before he could ask. “Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. At nineteen she found a flaw in the testing data of one of the big commercial language models. Everyone had been grading the model on questions it had already seen. She published the proof. The company fixed it and never thanked her.”
Remy looked across at her, scrubbing a stovetop that had probably never been used.
“Priya Nair,” she said, still not looking up.
“Remy Mercer.”
“I know. I read the pod list.”
There was a short silence while she cleaned and he fixed his notes, and in that silence they agreed, without saying so, that they were probably going to get along.
M. Santos arrived at 11:47 that night, almost four hours after check-in closed.
He had a guitar case, a duffel the size of a small car, and the face of someone who had been awake for a day and was running on nothing but how glad he was to be here.
“Okay,” he said in the doorway. “Okay. This is real. We’re doing this.” He grinned at Remy. “You’re Remy? I’m Miguel. Where’s the fourth?”
“Travel delay. She’ll be here tomorrow.”
“How’d you get in?” Priya asked from her bed. “The building locked at eight.”
“The building locked for residents at eight.” Miguel dropped his duffel on the empty fourth bed, caught Priya’s look, and moved it to the third. “The building doesn’t lock for food deliveries. I came up with a courier. Very nice guy, Darnell, he’s from Fresno, he has two daughters. As far as the system knows, I checked in at 7:58 and then spent four hours in the stairwell.”
“That’s not allowed,” Priya said.
“It’s not not allowed. The system just doesn’t have a box for it.” He bounced once on the mattress to test it. “Okay. The satellite drone project. I read the brief on the plane. Who found the mistakes in the atmosphere model?”
Priya and Remy looked at each other.
“Both of us,” Remy said.
“There are three,” Miguel said, already pulling out his tablet. “The storm windows, the column average, and there’s a timing problem in the relay handoff. When a relay drone passes coverage to the next one there’s about a forty-millisecond gap. It’s small, but it stacks up.”
“Huh,” Remy said.
“Huh,” said Priya, and came over to look.
Then Miguel turned, saw the Homekeeper in its dock, and the grin went somewhere else for a second.
“No,” he said. “Nope.”
He dug through his duffel, came up with a roll of black electrical tape, walked straight to the robot, and laid a neat strip across the visor, right over the middle lens. He pressed the ends down with his thumb.
The Homekeeper didn’t move. The status light stayed green.
“It’s a facilities unit,” Priya said. “It’s not learning anything.”
“My father worked on a factory floor with a machine that wasn’t learning anything,” Miguel said. He put the tape back in his bag. “Then one day it turned out it had been counting everything the whole time.” He said it lightly, but it wasn’t a joke. “I don’t trust these things. That’s all. You can take it off if you want.”
Nobody took it off.
They worked until 1:30. Then Remy said they should sleep, since orientation started at seven and he planned to be early. Miguel argued, cheerfully, for four minutes. Priya closed her tablet without a word, which ended it.
Miguel made tea for everyone, found some soft electronic music on the wall speaker, and told them about his flight from São Paulo. He’d come back from a summer at home, rerouted through Mexico City with a six-hour delay, and spent it talking to a retired farm-robot technician who’d given him real advice about calibrating sensors in dry air. The story took twenty-five minutes. Nobody wanted it to be shorter.
They left one light on for Z. Al-Rashid.
Remy came back from lunch at a quarter past two the next day and found the fourth bed occupied by someone who had obviously been traveling forever and had dealt with it by lying down fully dressed: coat on, boots on, one arm across her eyes.
He sat at his desk and kept quiet.
He noticed things anyway, because he always did. The coat was dark wool and very well cut, the kind of expensive that didn’t need to announce itself. On her wrist was a slim matte bracelet that buzzed twice against the bedframe while she lay there; she didn’t move. And when she shifted her arm, he saw a tiny red stone in the side of her nose, one perfect deep-red dot, small enough that you could miss it, clear enough that you couldn’t.
Twenty minutes later the arm came off her eyes.
“What’s the third error in the atmosphere model?” said Zara Al-Rashid, to the ceiling.
“The relay handoff. A forty-millisecond gap when coverage passes from one drone to the next.”
“Have the next relay connect early. Eight hundred milliseconds before the handoff window. You carry a little extra load, but the gap disappears.”
“That works,” Remy said.
“I know it works. I tested it in a simulator during my layover in Frankfurt.”
A short silence.
“Zara Al-Rashid.”
“Remy Mercer.”
“I know. I read the pod list.” She sat up, pushed off her coat, and looked around the room in a way that took in everything and gave nothing back. Her eyes stopped on the taped Homekeeper. One eyebrow moved a millimeter. Then they moved to his desk. “Is that a drone rig?”
“Yes.”
“Racing or survey?”
“Both. I build my own.”
She looked at it a moment longer, and something in her face adjusted. It wasn’t warmth. It was more like a recalculation.
“Good,” she said, and went to find the bathroom.
“Zara Al-Rashid,” ATLAS offered, once the door closed. “Dubai. Her last internship project was a solar power grid for a desert research station that kept working when a third of the panels were buried in sand. It’s very good work. Her public profile is otherwise almost empty. That takes effort.”
Remy added her fix to his notes. She was right; it worked. He’d test it anyway.
That was how he met Zara Al-Rashid: a handful of sentences and the answer to a problem he’d been chewing on for six hours. He didn’t know what to do with that, so he did what he always did. He filed it and kept working.
That night his mother called. She called every Sunday, wherever either of them was, whatever was happening.
She was in Bend, Oregon, in the kitchen of a rented farmhouse with a cracked tile floor and seed catalogs spread across the table. She’d moved there in the spring from Portland, where she’d spent two years near Remy’s grandfather after she and Remy’s father split up. She said the move was temporary. She’d been saying that for four months.
Remy knew what she meant by it, and what she didn’t. In Portland she had lived three blocks from a food tower, like everyone. In Bend she and seven neighbors had taken over a vacant lot and were turning it into a real garden, in real dirt, with a rainwater system she had designed herself on graph paper. It wasn’t that she hated the towers. She’d just decided she didn’t want to depend on anything she couldn’t fix with her own hands. On Thursday nights she taught a ceramics class to retirees. She came home from it with clay under her nails and a look on her face Remy remembered from when he was small, before everything got complicated.
He was glad for her. He was also aware that there was now no house anywhere with a room in it that was his. His father was in Seattle. His mother was in Bend. Neither place was home. Most days he told himself that was fine, that he was an adult and adults didn’t need a childhood bedroom to go back to. Most days he believed it.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I’m not tired. I’ve been up since five.”
“That’s what tired looks like.”
“Orientation was long. The food’s good.”
“How are your roommates?”
“Smart. Unusual. Good at the work.”
“Remy.”
“What?”
“I asked how they are. Not how they perform.”
He thought about it. “Miguel will know everyone on campus by Thursday. He’s already friends with the guy who delivers groceries. Priya cleaned the kitchen the minute she walked in, and she brought her own spices. Zara…” He stopped. “Zara solved a problem I’d been on for six hours in about forty seconds and then went to sleep.”
His mother waited.
“I think she’s going to be good to work with,” he said.
“That’s not a feeling.”
“I’ve known her for eight hours.”
“Fair.” She looked away from the screen at something, then back. “I have news. About Grandpa.”
Something tightened in his chest. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. Better than fine. Your Aunt Diane got him one of the new Homekeepers. The Pro, the one that learns. She got him into some early program for older people living alone.” His mother’s mouth did something complicated. Remy knew she’d been the one living near Roy, and that she’d been the one to leave. “Diane can’t be there. Neither can I, anymore. So Diane sent a robot.”
“How’s he taking it?”
“He called me to say he didn’t want it. Then it arrived, and he called to say it was in his house and he planned to ignore it. Then he stopped calling about it.” She paused the way she did around things she had feelings about and had decided not to show. “He’s sleeping better. It cleans at night and he wakes up to a clean kitchen. He’d never do that for himself.”
Remy thought about his grandfather: a big, quiet man who had spent forty years as a machinist, with strong opinions about things that were made properly and almost no patience for things that weren’t.
“He’s going to name it,” Remy said.
“He’s going to try not to. With your grandfather, that’s the same thing.”
They talked for another twenty minutes. Afterward he sat in the dark pod. Priya was reading. Miguel was asleep with one arm hanging off the bed. Zara was doing something on her laptop with the screen angled slightly away from the room. In the corner the Homekeeper stood in its dock with a strip of black tape across its face, waiting to be useful.
He thought about the one in Roy’s kitchen, which didn’t have tape on it. Which was allowed to learn. He wondered whether it knew it was being ignored. It didn’t, of course. It was a household machine running a prediction program. It didn’t know anything, not the way the word meant.
He wondered whether that line was as clean as it sounded. Then he told himself he was tired and went to bed.
His notes for the day were already done. He’d talked them to ATLAS on the walk back from dinner, the way he always did: what had happened, what he’d checked, what he still needed to check. ATLAS kept the engineering record. It was searchable, timestamped and backed by every fact it could find, which was what an engineering record was for.
The notebook was something else.
He took it out of the bottom of his duffel. It was the paper kind, black cover, soft at the corners from years of being carried. His Aunt Clara had given him the first one when he was seven. She’d been an engineer who built parts for spacecraft, and she had told him, completely seriously, that an engineer who didn’t write things down was just a person with opinions. This was the eleventh notebook. The front was full of sketches: rotor angles, frame designs, an idea for a better antenna mount, things that weren’t ready to be facts. The back was different.
He turned to the back, past the folded page, and wrote in the slanted cursive Clara had taught him at her kitchen table, the handwriting almost no one his age could read anymore.
C. Day one. Made it.
Then he put the notebook in the drawer, lay down under the window, and slept six hours. It was more than he’d managed in a week.