They say Earth is a paradise restored. Jo Robin grew up in that paradise. The green valleys where her family grow their crops was once a wasteland. The Reclamation has worked. Humanity has learnt its lesson.
But Jo has always looked up at the stars instead of down at the soil. While her neighbours celebrate harvests, she studies the colony ships flickering past in the night sky, drifting between stars, tending to humanity’s scattered outposts. For Jo, Earth has become a beautiful cage.
After seven rejections from off-world programs, she has stopped applying and began to draw up plans to build her own way out. Now all she needs is one chance, and the courage to take it.
1.1 The Eighteenth Song
‘Let’s be real.’ Three words. Or is it four. They’ve been circling around in Jo’s head since they were sung by the guy with frizzy black hair and one useless arm that hangs beside him doing nothing. She would like to make a reply. Something like: ‘It’s bloody hard to be real when your only choices feel like they’ve come out of a second-hand manual someone found in a charity shop.’
The bar is playing music from before the Restoration. Real guitars and two flesh and blood singers fill the gaps between the flowing tides of conversation and the noisy clanging of glasses, with music that’s refreshingly vibrant. Jo has counted seventeen different pre-Restoration songs since they arrived three hours before, and this was the eighteenth. She’s keeping track because Mira keeps asking if they should leave yet, and Jo keeps saying ‘just one more song.’ At some point they’ll need to leave or the last shuttle back to the Eastern Agricultural Sector will depart without them and they’ll have to pay for hotel rooms neither of them can afford.
From her jacket pocket comes a quiet chirp. Pru’s core unit is reminding Jo about the shuttle schedule. Jo reaches down and gives the pocket a gentle pat, which is the signal for ‘I know, shut up.’ The chirp stops. Back home the unit has a full body to walk around in, but for trips to New Helion, Jo just carries the brain module. It’s less conspicuous that way. The thing has seventeen different alert tones and Jo has counted every one of them over the years. Some are helpful. Most are designed to help her become a “responsible young woman.” This was, apparently, what her parents thought she needed on her sixteenth birthday. She was given a refurbished Model 47 Personal Development Assistant, with scratched casing and outdated firmware. What Jo’s made of it since then is something her parents definitely didn’t intend. And probably wouldn’t approve of.
The city’s called New Helion, which sounds aspirational in the way that post-Restoration names always do. It’s home to 840,000 people in a space that would have held only 90,000 before the Consolidation. Everything is vertical here in New Helion: buildings stacked on buildings, gardens climbing walls, solar panels that look like art installations catching the last of the evening light. Transportation moves on three separate levels depending on whether you’re walking, cycling, or using the automated pods. Wind turbines spin gracefully on rooftops, and every surface that isn’t glass seems to be growing something. Vegetables, flowers, and vines that produce unblemished fruit. It’s beautiful in its intentional way. It’s a city that’s constantly performing sustainability for an audience that’s no longer watching. Jo finds it impressive and claustrophobic. It’s as if someone has taken a normal city and compressed it until all the air has been squeezed out, and then decorated the compression with greenery to make it look deliberate.
Mira is on her third drink, something blue that apparently tastes of piefruit, the most popular post-Restoration berry that’s designed to offer a cacophony of sour flavours. Mira works at the processing plant two towns over from Windcross, handling quality control for heritage grain shipments. They met at an agricultural conference four years ago when both were eighteen and bored and convinced that farm life was slowly killing them through mundane repetition. Mira has since decided she’s fine with mundane repetition as long as she gets her weekends off. Jo hasn’t reached that conclusion yet, despite having to work seven days a week. Instead, she’s been spending those seven days sketching technical diagrams in the margins of crop reports and researching hull specifications when she should be sleeping. She hasn’t told Mira about any of that yet. Some ideas need to grow in private before you let other people trample them with their reasonable objections. Pru knows, of course. She’s seen every sketch, heard every muttered calculation. Pru alternates between offering surprisingly useful insights about thrust-to-weight ratios and asking whether this behaviour is “consistent with responsible adult female decision-making patterns.”
“So,” Mira says, setting down the blue drink with the precision of someone who’s beginning to lose their motor skills. “So,” she repeats. “Marcus gave you flowers again.” She winks. Or at least tries to wink.
“Roses,” says Jo. “Twelve beautiful red roses. He counted them out when he gave them to me. I’d have preferred yellow.”
“Twelve is a very specific number.”
“Everything Marcus does is very specific. He would have calculated the optimal number of roses to communicate serious romantic intent without being overwhelming.” Jo picks at the label on her own drink. It’s called Meridian Sunset and tastes exactly like grapefruit and nothing like sunset. She’d ordered it because the name suggests travel, destination… She loves the idea that you could watch the sun go down from different places rather than the same farm fields year after year.
“You could do worse,” Mira says, which is something people keep saying about Marcus, as if ‘you could do worse’ was a compelling reason to bind your life to someone you don’t particularly like.
“My sister certainly thinks so,” Jo says. “Cass would probably marry him herself if she could. She thinks he’s near perfect. And he’s committed to the land.” Cass is nineteen and sensible beyond her years, already planning her future in farming with the kind of certainty Jo has never felt.
“Yes I could do worse. But I could also do different. I could also make my own choices instead of having them made for me.”
“Different like what?”
Jo traces a finger through the condensation on her glass, drawing a pattern that might have been a ship or might have been a very angular bird. “Different like not here. Different like the colonies. Different like actually seeing something beyond the Eastern Agricultural Sector and New Helion and the occasional trip to the hub for equipment repair.”
Mira sighs. They’re about to have that conversation again, the same conversation they’ve been having in various forms for four years now. “You know it’s not like it used to be. The exodus is over. It has been over for years. They’re not handing out colony tickets anymore.”
“They never handed them out,” Jo says. “They sold them. And now they don’t even do that. Now you need special skills or family already settled or approval from the World Stewardship Council, which basically means if you’re useful to the colonies, you can leave, but if you’re just someone who wants to go, you’re out of luck.”
“You’re a farmer. Farms are useful.”
“Farms are useful to Earth. That’s the problem. They want us here, making food, keeping the paradise running. The whole Restoration thing only works if people like us stay put and tend the gardens.” Jo hears the bitterness in her own voice and tries to dial it back. This is supposed to be a birthday celebration. Her twenty-third. She’s well and truly an adult by even the most conservative standards, though she feels she hasn’t yet experienced the freedom of adulthood other people seem to have. She’s been running half the farm since she was sixteen. And she still feels she’s being treated like a kid.
1.2 Trajectory
Jo’s attention is suddenly drawn to a man in a flight jacket. It’s the real kind, worn at the elbows, with mission patches clustered on one shoulder like a collection of merit badges. He’s talking to the bartender about atmospheric readings or fuel efficiency or something equally incomprehensible and equally appealing. His hair is doing that thing where it’s clearly been under a helmet all day but has recovered enough to look intentionally casual.
Jo realises she’s staring and forces herself to look back at her Meridian Sunset. But the thought arrives anyway, uninvited but persistent: someone like that would have a way off-world. Pilots have skills. Pilots have connections. Pilots don’t get stuck running their family’s farm because leaving would disappoint the Council. Maybe what she needs isn’t twelve calculated roses but someone with access to a ship and reasons to use it. Maybe partnership isn’t supposed to be about comfortable compatibility and shared agricultural interests. Maybe it’s about trajectory, about where you could go together that you couldn’t manage alone. She glances back at the pilot, who’s now laughing at something the bartender said, and feels a small, practical hope kindle somewhere beneath her ribs. She begins to feel slightly calculating and mercenary, which is probably not how you’re supposed to feel about potential romance on your twenty-third birthday. But then again, Marcus had calculated his roses, hadn’t he? Maybe everyone is just working the angles of their own escape routes.
The bar’s getting louder. It’s Saturday night and for New Helion’s consolidated population, ‘going out’ requires actually going somewhere specific rather than just wandering into the nearest pub like you could in Windcross. The people here are different too. They’re younger, on average. They dress in clothes that have style rather than function. Jo’s wearing her best top. She’s braless too, which somehow feels appropriately less functional. She still feels like she’s arrived in farm clothes though. Which technically she had, since everything she owns is farm-related.
“What about the guild?” Mira asks. “You could apply for pilot training. They take farmers sometimes, if you can prove you have spatial reasoning skills.”
“The guild takes farmers who want to be guild pilots. But they don’t take farmers who want to leave. That’s the problem.” Jo had already looked into this. She had spent hours reading guild application requirements on the network, trying to find a loophole. There wasn’t one. The guild wants people who accept their postings, fly their routes, and follow their schedules. They want reliable transport workers, not people using pilot training as an escape route.
Mira sits quiet for a moment. She’s watching the crowd. The bar has started playing song number nineteen. The loud synthesisers produce a beat that makes Jo’s free breasts vibrate slightly. “You know what your problem is?” Mira says finally.
“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”
“You were born forty years too late. If you’d been our age during the exodus, you could’ve left. No special skills required, no council approval. They’d have put you on a colony ship, wished you luck and waved you goodbye.”
This is true. It’s also the thing that makes Jo want to scream sometimes. The fact that there had been a window, a free exodus, between 2080 to 2100, when leaving Earth was not just allowed but encouraged. When the planet was dying and space seemed like humanity’s only future and they’d built ships and opened colonies and anyone willing to risk the time-bending journey could go. And then Earth had healed, and suddenly leaving became suspicious, selfish, wasteful. Why abandon paradise? Why squander what Dr. Chen had given us?
“It’s not fair,” Jo says. She realises as soon as she says it that it sounds selfish. “It’s not fair that the people who stayed get to decide that everyone else has to stay too. It’s not fair that we helped fix the planet and the reward is being trapped on it.”
“Trapped in paradise,” Mira says. “Yes, that’s truly terrible.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.” Mira reaches across the small table and squeezes Jo’s hand. “I also know that Marcus is a very decent man who’d give you a very decent life. I also know that you’d be perfectly miserable in that very decent life. So if you’re asking my opinion as your friend who dragged herself two hours on the shuttle to celebrate your birthday in a city neither of us particularly likes, my opinion is: don’t marry him. Marry that pilot you’ve been staring at.”
Jo smiles. “Marcus hasn’t even asked yet.”
“He will ask. Probably soon. Men like Marcus don’t give twelve roses casually.”
Jo finishes her Meridian Sunset, which has gone warm and slightly flat. She sets the glass down precisely in the centre of its coaster. “What if there’s another way?”
“Another way to what?”
“Another way to leave. Imagine if you didn’t need the guild’s approval or the council’s permission? Imagine if you could just build a ship and go?” Jo’s smile gets bigger.
Mira laughs. Not unkindly, but the kind of laugh that acknowledges an idea as technically possible – but impossible. In the same way building a pyramid out of cheese is technically possible. “Build a ship. With what? Tractors, harvesters and an overdose of optimism?”
“There are scrapyards. They have old ships doing nothing. Don’t you remember? People used to build their own transports before everything got regulated. It’s not impossible. Just improbable.”
From Jo’s pocket comes a quiet chirp. Then Pru’s voice, muffled but distinct through the fabric: “Building unauthorised spacecraft violates seventeen separate World Stewardship Council regulations and demonstrates poor risk assessment consistent with…”
Jo pats her pocket firmly. The voice cuts off mid-sentence.
Mira stares. “Did your PDA just…”
“She does that,” Jo says. “I’ve been teaching her about spacecraft mechanics. She’s developed opinions.”
“She’s right too. What you’re thinking about doing is incredibly dangerous that’s what it is.” Mira is looking at Jo’s pocket with a mixture of amusement and concern.
“So was the Restoration. So was time-bending travel when they first developed it. Everything worth doing is dangerous.” Jo leans back, warming to her own argument. “Besides, working on the farm isn’t without its dangers. Life is dangerous. Last summer, Dad nearly lost three fingers to the thresher. The year before that, Aunt Cara broke her collarbone when the irrigation rig collapsed. We breathe pesticides that are supposedly safe but probably aren’t, we work equipment that could crush us if we make one wrong move, and we do it all under a thin layer of ozone that’s been restored to ‘optimal levels’ by people who thought they knew what optimal meant. Safety is just a story we tell ourselves so we can function. At least if I died building a ship, it would be toward something I actually wanted.”
Mira looks at Jo with an expression Jo can’t categorise. Concern, maybe, mixed with something that might be admiration or might be worry that her friend had finally gone insane. “Are you serious? Are you actually thinking about this?”
“Yes,” Jo says.
“Jo!”
“I’m twenty-three years old. I’ve spent my entire life on Earth. I’ve never seen a colony. I’ve never experienced time-bending travel. I’ve never watched a sunrise from anywhere except the same farm where my grandfather watched sunrises and my father watches sunrises and where presumably I’m supposed to watch sunrises until I’m too old to get up early. And then I’ll die and someone will plant something over my grave because that’s how we honour the dead now. We turn them into fertiliser.” Jo pauses. “I just want to see something else. Is that really so unreasonable?”
The music has shifted to song number twenty. This time it’s a woman singing about roads and leaving behind the things you carry with you. Jo wonders if the bar’s music selection algorithm is eavesdropping on conversations and choosing songs accordingly. Maybe everyone in this city is having similar conversations about staying versus going, contentment versus restlessness, struggling with the weight of an inherited paradise.
“No,” Mira says quietly. “It’s not unreasonable. But neither is wanting to stay. And neither is Marcus wanting to build a life with you, even if it’s not the life you want.” She picks up her blue drink, discovers it’s empty, and sets it back down. “Just promise me something.”
“What?”
“If you do this, if you actually try to build a ship, promise you’ll be careful. Promise you won’t get yourself killed trying to escape a planet that most people would do anything to live on.”
Jo thinks about this. About careful versus reckless, about the seventeen warnings she’s received about various inadvisable things she’s done over the years, about how ‘careful’ and ‘ambitious’ rarely occupy the same space. “I promise I’ll try to be careful,” she says, which was the most honest guarantee she could give.
Mira seems to accept this. She stands and gathers her jacket. “Come on. If we leave now we can catch the 23:40 shuttle and be home by two. We can sleep on the transport and pretend this counts as a wild night out.”
“Does this not count as a wild night out?” Jo asks, checking that she hasn’t left anything under the table. She has. Her green canvas bag containing her network tablet, her farm identification, and a small notebook where she had sketched ship designs when she was supposed to be calculating fertiliser ratios. She picks it up.
“By Agricultural Sector standards? Absolutely. We drank alcohol, we stayed out past eleven, we had deep conversations about the meaning of existence. We’re rebels.”
Jo glances back towards the bar one more time. The pilot’s still there, now shrugging off his flight jacket in that unselfconscious way people do when they’re between one state and another – between shifts, between shirts, between wherever they’ve been and wherever they’re going next. The night could become wild, she thought, if they stayed. If she went over there and said something clever or interesting or even just honest. If she asked about the patches on his jacket or where he’s flown in from or whether he’d ever consider taking on a passenger with agricultural skills and an excessive desire to leave the planet. But Mira was already heading towards the door, and Jo was twenty-three and responsible and had irrigation schedules to review in the morning. She turns away from the possibility and follows her friend into the exit lane.
They make their way through the crowd. Jo counts forty-seven people between their table and the door. They leave the club and venture out into the New Helion night. The city’s different after dark: quieter in some ways, louder in others. The vertical architecture creates strange acoustic effects where sound bounces between buildings like confused birds looking for somewhere to land.
The air smells of cooking food and that particular scent that comes from too many people in too small a space. Jo misses the farm smell. She misses it and feels guilty about missing it, because she wants to leave. But maybe that’s the thing nobody tells you about leaving: you might want desperately to go and still love what you’re leaving. You could dream of colonies and still appreciate heritage tomatoes. The desire to see the universe doesn’t cancel out the beauty of the place you’re born to. It just means you want both. And the world isn’t built to let you have both.
They reach the shuttle station, show their tickets to the validation scanner, find seats in the nearly empty passenger compartment. The shuttle will take two hours to reach the Agricultural Sector, stopping at six smaller stations along the way. Jo presses her forehead against the window glass, and watches New Helion recede as they begin the journey back to the fields.
In her pocket, Pru chirps softly. The tone is different this time. It’s one Jo’s come to recognise as curiosity rather than warning. “Calculating optimal trajectory for unauthorised departure,” Pru’s voice whispers. “Based on available scrapyard inventory estimates and your current skill level, project completion time: four point three years. Probability of success: twelve percent. Probability that this constitutes responsible adult female behaviour: zero point zero three percent.”
Jo smiles and whispers back, “What’s the point-zero-three percent?”
“That’s the margin of error in my responsible adult female behaviour algorithms. They may be mis-calibrated.”
“Good,” Jo murmurs. “Let’s keep it that way.”
Jo becomes pensive as she watches the city lights disappear into the growing darkness. Twenty-three years old. That’s eight thousand three hundred and ninety-five days of sunrise over the same fields. Eight thousand three hundred and ninety-five days of counting things and cataloguing shades of green and wondering what else was out there. Eight thousand three hundred and ninety-five days of paradise, and she has spent at least half of them planning her escape.
Tomorrow she’ll go back to the farm. She’ll smile at her father’s birthday breakfast, accept Sylvia’s carefully chosen gift. This will be something practical, something that shows Sylvia is trying even if she doesn’t quite understand. Jo will be polite to Marcus when he inevitably stops by with some excuse about borrowing equipment or returning a tool. She will do all the things that twenty-three-year-old farmer’s daughters are supposed to do.
But she will also, she has decided, find that scrapyard Petra once mentioned. Petra drives the grain hauler route and talks too much, but sometimes his gossip is useful. The scrapyard is hidden in Tanners’ Ravine, run by some disgraced engineer who supposedly has parts off old ships from the pre-standardisation era when people purchased their own transports and nobody had to ask permission to head out for the stars.
Jo has been counting things her whole life. Tomorrow she’ll start counting parts. Counting what she’ll need. Counting the steps between where she is and where she wants to be.