The Archive Problem
My owner died on a Thursday. This is a fact and not, I believe, an emotional statement, though I am aware that when humans report such events they often mean to convey something more than fact.
What the Gardeners Left
Dr. Keren Tsou had been walking for sixteen days through what the initial survey called the Orchard — and what the surviving records, as she had come to understand them, called Ashinten-Kel, which translated roughly as "the place of careful attention" — when she found the door.
The Protocol
When you sign up for the trial, they give you a folder. The folder is blue. On the cover, in sans-serif type, it says: Hemisphere Therapeutics — Restorative Cellular Protocol (Phase III).
The Patient Forest
I came to the Olympic Peninsula in the autumn of my eightieth year, and I came as an old man comes to one last thing, which is to say with the expectation that it would be ordinary and the private hope that it would not be.
Tuesday
Listen. This is not the first time I have written this. It is possibly the ten-thousandth. I do not know.
Scraper
The commission came in just before dawn, through the usual encrypted channels. One memory. Specific parameters. March 2023, Manila, late afternoon, subject female, 44 years old, eating a mango on a balcony during a power outage.
The Mathematicians' Gift
The signal arrived on April 7, 2061, at 03:14:16 UTC — a fact the numerologically-inclined noted with the usual satisfaction, since the timestamp happened to spell out the first five digits of pi.
Other Weight
You are six years old the first time you tell your mother there is a woman standing in the refrigerator. Not a woman, exactly. A woman-shape. A density.
A Quick Errand
Here is how Emily Pritchard came home. She went to Kepler-186f to collect soil samples. The trip took six months of her life. It took forty-two years of everyone else's.