Goldilocks

Really, they were afraid of women. Or hated them. Wasn’t that much the same thing?

Everyone had grown used to giving orders to the pleasant-voiced feminine robots. Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Sage, do this for me. A perky ‘okay’, and your wish was her command. They’d all been doing it for years before women started realising the men in their lives had been conditioned to do the same to them. And by then it was too late.

It hadn’t happened in a moment, but a series of moments, as slow and insidious as the melting of the ice caps. Women had been ushered out of the workplace, so subtly that few noticed until it was too late. There had been no grand lowering of an iron curtain, with passports voided and bank accounts emptied. There had been a few men in sharp suits quoting scripture with silver tongues, but it was cursory, just enough to wrangle part of the Christian vote. Really, they were afraid of women. Or hated them. Wasn’t that much the same thing? The country saw those angry men as a fringe movement right up until one was elected president.

Earth was such a little, vulnerable thing in the grand scope of the universe.

Whenever I asked her to tell me what happened up there, Naomi would say no one who has been to space could ever describe it to someone who hasn’t.

Naomi had little faith left in anyone willing to do what it takes to get into power.

I’m tired of the -isms they love to use to break us down.

This is your first big setback. How are you going to react to it? That’s what’ll show your mettle. Not the failure, but what you do next.

But scientists veered from naming things poetically—drawing from myth and legend—to incredibly factual, with letters and numbers or baldly stating the obvious.

Evan Kan: It doesn't matter. We wasted time. Went our different directions. I know I messed up, after my dad died. I shut down. By the time I realized how I felt, you were already with Cole. So I stepped back. Tried to forget. Dated other people. Nothing stuck. Then you divorced, but you were in Scotland. I could have booked a flight. Or called. Something. Evan Kan: Haven't you wondered why I agreed to be Valerie's point of contact on Earth? I didn't do it for her.

The crew of the Atalanta were only five women out of all of humanity, but they could still found a whole new place for humans to flourish. Sometimes you only need one tiny proportion of the population to enact change

A pregnancy that ended before it could truly begin. A missed period that turned into an ellipsis of a promise, then an interrupted dash.