This is the story we keep telling. And I think we tell it because we’re afraid to tell the other one.

The USS Ascension from the SciFi series of the same name. The typical dystopian “everyone hates everyone else and we were all tricked to be here on a prison ship model which, oops, its actually a social experiment gone awry” trope.

Darkness as a Prestige Marker

Dystopia became the serious writer’s signal. It says: I am not naive. I see the darkness. I am not selling you a comfortable lie. And that instinct isn’t wrong — cautionary fiction has a legitimate and necessary function. Orwell mattered. Le Guin’s darker work mattered. The warning has value.

But somewhere along the way, the warning became the default. Darkness stopped being a tool and became a pose. If everything is broken and terrible, your characters only need to survive and resist. You don’t have to do the harder work, the genuinely harder work, of imagining how people actually build something worth surviving for.

The generation ship is the perfect place to see this laziness at work, because the premise almost demands it. A closed system. A captive population. Generations who never chose to be there. It maps so cleanly onto authoritarian allegory that writers reach for the dystopia almost reflexively, before they’ve asked the more interesting question.

What if it worked?

The Space Station Nobody Thought To Ask About

Here’s a reframe that changes everything: a generation ship isn’t really a ship. It’s a space station with a destination.

The O’Neill cylinder, the Bernal sphere, the Stanford torus, all serious proposals for long-duration space habitation that were never conceived as conveyances. They were conceived as homes. Rotating habitats with agriculture, industry, culture, community. Places people would live, not sentences people would serve.

The interior of an O’Neil Cylinder. Homes instead of cramped, cell-like cabins. Life instead of existence.

At near-light speeds, relativistic time dilation compresses the subjective experience of the journey. Depending on the acceleration profile, the crossing doesn’t have to span generations at all. But even if it does, so what? People are born into circumstances they didn’t choose all the time. The question is whether the society they’re born into is worth inhabiting.

A ship designed as a home, governed as a community, and launched by people who chose this life isn’t a prison. It’s a civilization in transit. And civilizations in transit have drama that doesn’t require a boot on anyone’s neck.

Think about what actually happens when that ship arrives.

Some people want to go down. They’ve been carrying the covenant their whole lives: the planet was the point, and to orbit it and never touch soil feels like dying before the finish line.

Some people don’t want to leave. The ship is home. Everything they love is here: their history, their dead, their culture, their art. The gravity well below represents not liberation but exile from everything that matters.

Some people want to compromise. Stay in orbit, establish contact, build slowly, let the ship become a station. Sensible. Pragmatic. Deeply unsatisfying to everyone with actual convictions.

And some, and this is the one that keeps me up at night, some want to keep going. They caught the bug. There’s another star system four light-years further, and now that they know they can do this, why would they ever stop?

Nobody in any of these factions is wrong. Nobody is a villain. The conflict is structural and not moral which is infinitely more interesting than another revolution against another tyrant. (And frankly, we have enough autocracy in the world right now that we don’t need stories of how it happened. How we build out of that, or prevent them from happening, are more important.)

The generation ship Axiom from Pixar's WALL-E

A Family, A Lover, A Baby

Let me make it concrete, because the abstract only goes so far.

A family wants to stay. But the oldest parent who remembers, or whose parents remembered, the founding covenant, needs to touch ground before she dies. She isn’t being irrational. She is asking her children to watch her leave them for a place they can’t follow.

Two people are in love. One has a responsibility to the ship that cannot be walked away from. The other is an explorer by nature, someone for whom staying anywhere too long is a slow erosion of the self. Neither is wrong. The tragedy isn’t a conflict of good versus evil. It’s the simple, devastating fact that they are made of different things.

A baby is born aboard who cannot survive full gravity. Her parents have been waiting their entire lives for the planet. Their dream is physiologically unavailable to their child and its not because anyone failed, not because the system is cruel, but because the universe is indifferent to the promises we make to ourselves. And when that child grows up, what if she becomes the most passionate advocate for staying that her generation has ever produced? What if she’s furious at being treated like a tragedy?

These are not dystopian stories. They are human stories. The difference is that a dystopia outsources the moral weight to the setting: you know who to root for because the author built a target. It's easy. Lazy. Sloppy. Almost as much an opiate for the masses as the dystopia it depicts — a self-referential romance that pretends to be about the struggle while letting the reader feel heroic without getting their hands dirty. Vicarious virtue signaling dressed up as resistance. A story like this asks you to hold the grief of multiple right answers simultaneously. That's harder to read. It's also more honest.

The inside of an imaginary Space Station/Generation Ship by artist Greg McKechnie.

The Accidental Lesson

I didn’t set out to build a hopepunk universe. I set out to write a short story about people doing meaningful work in a recovered world — cleaning up the detritus of the Century of Excess, rewinding suburban sprawl back into forest, making room for something better.

The story was called The Outquisition of Reston and it appears in my first collection: Dreams of a Freezing Ocean: Volume I. The antagonist was a ten-story office building and a century of bad urban planning. The conflict was between people who cared about the same things and expressed it differently. Nobody had a machine gun nest. The children weren’t traumatized. The post-collapse society was functional, purposeful, and worth living in.

And someone read it and said: Star Trek is a utopian society set in a dystopian universe. All the action happens at the fringes.

That sentence became the Gaiaverse. The setting for the novel Jessica Unbound: Gaia; the short Rattlesnake Ridge, which appears in Dreams of a Freezing Ocean, Volume II: Dark Oceans; as well as my upcoming Bradbury-style novel, Dreams of Gaia.

The lesson wasn’t that darkness doesn’t belong in fiction. The lesson was that hope is the more radical act. Despair costs nothing because it expects nothing. A story that dares to imagine people building something good — and then dramatizes the real, painful, unresolvable tensions that emerge from that goodness — is doing something braver than any dystopia in my humble opinion.

We don’t need another prison ship. We need to ask what happens when the home you built in the dark finally sees the light of another sun, and you have to decide what it means.

That’s the story worth telling.

SG Kubrak is the author of the Jessica Unbound series and the Dreams collections. The Outquisition of Reston appears in Dreams of a Freezing Ocean, Vol. 1, available now.

I still mostly don’t, if I’m being honest. Being an indie with no marketing team is sometimes a tug of war between writing and marketing. But I’ve got five books out now. I have two in beta: Dreams of New York, and Dreams of Gaia. I also have an eighth book in progress, the next Jessica Unbound, and I’m still writing, still putting things into the world that I care about.

I’m not going to pretend this post isn’t partly an ask, because it is. If you’ve read any of my books and haven’t left a review, I would genuinely appreciate it if you took two minutes to do that. Not because of the algorithm, though the algorithm does care. Because reviews are how other readers decide to take a chance on a writer they’ve never heard of. They’re the thing I can’t manufacture and can’t buy.

Here’s the full catalog if you need links:

Dreams of a Freezing Ocean: Vol. 1: https://a.co/d/0gV5nKXQ

Dreams of a Freezing Ocean: Vol. 2, Dark Oceans: https://a.co/d/0a80WVAV

Jessica Unbound: https://a.co/d/0hywSQjC

Jessica Unbound: Gaia: https://a.co/d/0aU2cKjX

The Adventures of Void Cat and Shadow: https://a.co/d/0eSTuAEH

Even a sentence or two makes a difference. Honest opinions only. I mean that.

Thank you for being here four years in. I hope you’ll come with me for the next four.

S.G. Kubrak

The goal of worldbuilding, at its core, is simpler and more demanding than any map can capture: make the reader believe. Not in everything — just in enough. Enough that they’ll follow your protagonist through a portal, sit beside them at a kitchen table, or feel the weight of an assistive device strapped to a wrist. The world doesn’t need to be complete. It needs to be felt.

The Difference Between Depth and Detail

There’s a distinction worth making between a world that has depth and one that’s drowning in detail. Depth means your world has internal logic — things happen for reasons, cause and effect hold, the texture feels consistent. Detail is the granular stuff: the exact specifications of a spacecraft, the etymology of a fictional language, the precise rules of a magic system.

Depth is essential. Detail is optional — and often counterproductive.

When you spend months perfecting a magic system before writing Chapter One, you haven’t built a better story. You’ve built a very elaborate reason to delay writing. The worldbuilding that matters is the worldbuilding that makes it onto the page, and the only way to know what belongs on the page is to write.

The maps and starmaps have their place. But they won’t make you write faster, and they won’t make your reader feel more.

Write From What You Know — Then Extrapolate

The most grounded worldbuilding comes from writers who are paying attention to their actual lives.

Not in a literal sense. You don’t have to be a deep-sea biologist to write about the ocean, or a soldier to write about war. But there’s a quality of attention — a practiced noticing — that separates worlds that feel lived-in from worlds that feel assembled. The writer who can walk into a room, glance around for a few seconds, close their eyes, and reconstruct almost every object and where it sits: that person is building their world every moment of every day, whether they intend to or not.

That’s the muscle. And like any muscle, it can be trained.

Notice the specific. Notice the friction of everyday objects, the way bodies move through space, the ambient sounds of a room. When you sit down to build a near-future world, those noticed details become the raw material. An assistive device on a wrist isn’t a plot point — it’s a texture, a small truth that tells the reader: this writer has been somewhere near here before.

For writers working in AI fiction specifically, this principle is load-bearing. Technology in fiction almost always fails in one of two ways: it’s either too vague to feel real, or too accurate to feel like a story. The way out of that trap is personal connection. Don’t write the tech you’ve read about — write the tech you understand, the tech you’ve lived adjacent to, the tech that has changed something about how you move through the world.

Near-Future as a Worldbuilding Strategy

One of the most practical decisions a speculative writer can make is to anchor their work in the near-future rather than the far.

Far-future worldbuilding demands that you account for cascading change — centuries of technological, social, and biological evolution that all need internal consistency. Near-future worldbuilding lets you leverage what you already know. The present becomes your foundation. You’re not inventing physics; you’re extrapolating trajectories.

Forty-five years of working with technology gives me something invaluable for this kind of writing: a feel for progression. Not just what technology is, but how it moves — the pace of adoption, the gap between research and deployment, the ways humans resist and accommodate and eventually absorb change into daily life.

Take something like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Is it imminent? Almost certainly not. Does that mean it’s off-limits as a fictional subject? Absolutely not. The question isn’t when — it’s what if. What if it arrived, imperfectly, with all the bureaucratic inertia and human messiness that would realistically surround it? Near-future thinking doesn’t constrain imagination. It gives imagination somewhere solid to push off from.

The Entry Point for Every Writer

You don’t need a lifetime in tech. You don’t need a photographic memory. What you need is a simpler thing: the ability to imagine yourself somewhere and ask, honestly, does this feel possible?

The best advice for any writer trying to build a believable world is this: picture a world you could actually stand in. Put yourself there. Feel the floor, the air, the quality of light. Then start describing what you see.

Your intuition will do most of the work from there. Something will feel off, or it will feel right. That gut sense is data. It’s not infallible, but it’s the same mechanism that tells readers whether to trust a world or not.

And here’s the permission that often goes unsaid: your world doesn’t have to be realistic. Wild is fine. Strange is fine. Impossible is fine. What it has to be is coherent on its own terms and consistent with the logic it establishes, and honest about the rules it’s playing by.

Build a world you’d want to visit. Or one you’d be afraid to. Either way, start from somewhere you can stand.

More soon!

When It Used to Snow in February is not about technology, or nostalgia, or even romance in the conventional sense. It is about proximity: how close people can come to each other in moments of disruption, and how those moments can echo for a lifetime without ever becoming a “story” anyone tells out loud.

This story is for the ones who kept the lights on, waited out the storm, and carried warmth through the cold, often without being seen, and without expecting to be remembered.

This story is part of my upcoming collection “Dreams of New York” and I want to share a preview here. This is the expansion of a vignette I wrote and published in Dreams of a Freezing Ocean: Volume 1 back in 2021.

When It Used to Snow in February

The kitchen bustled as the staff readied for the dinner rush. Orders would start pouring in any minute, and the more prepped, the better. Pots of pasta boiled, salads were chopped, chicken and eggplant floured and breaded. The place hummed with a rhythm practiced over decades.

A radio chimed from behind the long metal counter. Covered in years of flour and the occasional splatter of sauce, the speaker was barely visible behind its white shroud. The pale pink glow of the dial pulsed softly, like a heartbeat. It never moved from that spot, and no one wanted it to. The mellow strains of *Moonlight Sonata* trickled out.

The cook glanced up from the counter where he worked on the latest in a long line of pizzas stretching back to the Nixon Administration. Wind-driven snow whipped past the glass door. He grunted, reached for the sauce bucket beside the radio, and went on.

A long counter separated the kitchen from the dining area. The “restaurant” was little more than two Formica tables, a few wooden chairs, and a plastic menu board. Small and enclosed, it was always broiling from the heat of the twin gas-fired ovens. Both doors — front and back — usually stayed open to vent the air. Today, rare even for February, both were shut.

The front door blew open with a gust of wind, the bell barely chiming before it slammed against the glass. The cook called to the kitchen, and one of the part-time kids rushed out to push it closed.

“We might have to lock that,” he sighed.

The kid vanished back into the kitchen.

A minute later, the door flew open again, slamming into the window. The person entering struggled to close it, fighting the wind, holding balance. A black scarf was wrapped tightly around their face. The cook stepped from behind the counter to help but stopped when he saw the stranger get the door shut on her own.

“Thanks,” he said.

She turned. Behind the wool hat and snow-flecked scarf, a pair of hazel eyes smiled back. She unwound the scarf carefully to keep from scattering snow across the floor. Her features were delicate, her smile broad, her eyes bright under the fluorescent lights.

“Oh—hey there.” The cook recognized her but couldn’t place the name immediately. He glanced at the order board hanging under the menus.

“Yeah, uh, five minutes.” He gestured toward the table.

“Thanks, John,” she said, her voice confident but relaxed—the kind used to giving directions. “Crazy storm, huh?”

“I’ve seen worse,” he said. “School gonna close tomorrow?”

She sat down with a sigh and didn’t look toward the window. “I’ve never seen one this bad before. Probably.”

“So you get the day off?” he asked, kneading another ball of dough.

“I never get the day off,” she said lightly, her tone betraying more meaning than the words.

John nodded and didn’t press.

The kitchen clattered on. Customers pushed through, each wrestling with the wind and the less-than-substantial glass door.

“It’s ready!” John called over the bustle. A pizza box and white paper bag appeared on the counter as if by magic.

She got up and threaded through the crowd. John rang up the order, his floured hands deft on the register.

“Eleven fifty,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Yeah, everything went up a quarter. Blame Reagan.”

She sighed, counting out dimes and nickels.

The door blew open again. “Hey, Doctor!” John called with a grin.

She turned, hearing a deep, embarrassed voice answer, “Hey, John!”

She handed over her change, grabbed the pizza and bag, and pushed toward the door. An arm reached through the crowd to hold it open, sparing her from another blast of wind. She ducked out, head down.

Head and shoulders above the rest, the doctor scanned the packed restaurant. Customers jockeyed between the crush inside and the storm outside. He leaned against the back wall, one foot braced to keep the door from flying open again.

“Hang on!” John called. In one motion, he spun from the oven, lifted a pizza box, and handed it over the crowd. The doctor caught it easily with one hand, tossed a crumpled ten back with the other.

“You owe me two bucks!” he said.

John nodded, already pulling another pie for an impatient customer.

The doctor turned to go, then noticed a black scarf draped over a chair, he scanned the crowd and then looked out the glass door. “John!” he called. “She left her scarf.”

John gave a quick nod, distracted by the next order.

The doctor picked it up, hesitated, box in hand. “You know,” he said, “I’d better bring it to her. She can’t be far.”

“Yeah,” John murmured, half-listening.

The doctor shoved the scarf into his jacket pocket, steeled himself, and pushed through the door into the blinding snow. He looked both ways, searching for her. There was no sign. Even her tracks were gone in the spindrift.

The wind pushed against him like frozen waves crashing on the beach. He could barely see the glow of the pizza shop anymore. The red “OPEN” sign pulsed through the snow like a heartbeat slowing down.

He could go home. Or he could not. There wasn’t much waiting for him there besides a TV propped up on two wooden chairs and the sound of the radiator.

Parked in front of the shop, his truck buffeted in the wind. He’d already put in sixteen hours, and he was desperate to get some food in him before the wind died down and he was called back on shift. Bell telephone didn’t need heroes; they needed workers, and they needed them fed and ready to go. So he stood there, under a flickering streetlight, listening to the storm howl.

He imagined her walking the streets, pizza box pressed to her chest, trying to keep it warm for whoever was waiting at home.

The array had been dead for three seasons.

Sandstorms had scoured the panels until they were dull as stone. Wind had bent the support struts into skeletal bows. For a long time, the settlement had relied on scraps: fuel cells coaxed from abandoned haulers, firewood gathered from the brittle thorn groves. Enough to survive, never enough to breathe easy.

This morning, though, the crew gathered with brushes, rags, and lengths of copper wire. No one ordered them. No law demanded it. They simply agreed that the array would stand again.

The first hour was only dust and silence. A woman knelt with a rag, rubbing the film from one pane of glass. Beside her, an old man straightened a twisted frame with a grunt. Farther down the row, a child dragged a bucket of water from the well.
Then came a rhythm. The scrape of cloth across glass, steady. The clang of a wrench tightening a bolt. The creak of a brace falling back into place. Without speaking, they began to fall into time with one another.

A boy hummed, soft at first, then louder. The old man chuckled and picked up the tune. Soon the row of workers was moving to the same beat, voices carrying over the field. It wasn’t a hymn or a tradition. It was a song made for that moment, pulled from the cadence of hands and tools.

By midday, the array began to shimmer, each panel clean enough to catch the sun. They rewired broken circuits, tested connections, and propped new supports into the ground. The hum of their song carried them, kept their shoulders straight, kept their minds from drifting to hunger and thirst.

When the sun tipped west, someone shouted. A red light blinked along the junction box, then turned steady green. Moments later, the first of the settlement’s lamps flickered awake. Children whooped and danced in the dust. The workers leaned back, sweat streaking their faces, and broke into laughter. They clapped each other on the shoulders, hugged their children, and sang louder.

That night the lamps stayed lit until dawn. Families sat together beneath their glow, telling stories, sharing food, and replaying the rhythm of the day. The next morning, when work began again, the song came with them.

No one wrote it down. No one had to. It belonged to the work, to the hands that carried it forward.

They called it the Builders’ Song. And they sang it because it reminded them of what was true: that labor done together could hold back the dark, and that was reason enough for joy.

Everything has a beginning. Some beginnings are better than others. My days usually begin the same way: I’m not really sure of anything for the first few minutes. My eyes open up and I kinda make the assumption that I am still alive and this isn’t the afterlife, then I wait for it to kick in. The pain.

Carl Reiner once said that the first thing he did when he woke up was to check the obituaries, and if he wasn’t in it, he’d have his coffee. The first thing I check on is how much everything hurts. Like I said, some beginnings are better than others. Today was no different and this was not a better day. My back was killing me. That bit right above the sacrum between the hips, along the spine. I did something to myself yesterday, but I don’t really know what it was. It didn’t cross my mind at the time, but now I am paying for it. But it’s just the back, at least that’s what I feel at the moment.

I try not to think about the pain for a little bit to start my day. A lot of this is mental, and if I can convince my brain that things aren’t as bad as they feel, then maybe my body will follow along. So I focus on what I can see and feel around me. The sun is streaming through the windows, which is nice. The sheer curtains I have up let me see the light outside. It’s not too bad at night. My apartment does face south, but it’s also facing the street, so I do see the streetlights. They are these nice LEDs that’s are a warm glow, not the bright orange of the old sodium lights. The tops of the lamps are covered so they don’t bleed into the sky above. It helps. You can see fourteen stars now instead of just twelve.

Coffee. See? I am stealing from Carl. If I can smell my coffee it means I can get up, eventually. It’s my favorite brand, in a drip maker. The hissing of the drip and the heat plate let me know I’m alive. Of course the pain did that, but it’s my motivation to get out of the bed.

As usual, I don’t want to get out of the aforementioned bed. The sheets are crisp and white. Nice and warm. The heating blanket that I have over them keeps it toasty in there, and it keeps the rest of the joints from complaining too much on me. It generally takes a big event, or if I have been too active the day before, for it to really hurt if the blanket is on. “Really active” means I went for a walk. Even in my fifties, I would take massive walks throughout the city, sometimes ten to twelve miles a day. Now, two decades later, if I can get around the block I call that a win. A very active one at that.

I can’t hear anything since I don’t sleep with my hearing aids in. A lot of people at the community center get on my case about that. They keep telling me that if there is a fire or something in my building I won’t be able to hear the alarm and that I can die in my bed. Really, if I was that worried about an apartment fire, I wouldn’t be living on the Upper West Side by myself. I’d have let my son convince me to move to suburban Pittsburgh with him and his family. So they can wait on me hand and foot and not let me have any independence at all.

“Dad,” he’d say, “I worry about you all alone in that apartment. Why don’t you come stay with us? We’ll take care of you. You won’t need to do anything at all.”

Yeah. Like a pet. You watch me to make you feel better while I waste away watching reruns of MacGyver and Star Trek. Well, I would do that anyway, but only because it’s what I want to do, not because it’s my only choice. Not having the hearing aids in lets me shut out the noise so I can sleep. If I burn, I burn. Pain isn’t something I never deal with, right?

But again, my back hurts, and the longer I lay here, the worse it’s gonna feel later. So I swing the blankets off me, bracing for the shock as I go. It’s cold in the room, despite the sun streaming through the windows. I’m wrapped in thermal underwear and sweatpants, so it’s gonna take a few minutes for the cold to penetrate them, but I know that it’s cold simply because I can feel that two-degree drop. I keep my eyes closed as my body starts adjusting to gravity; each joint slowly slips into place with a sickening slide.

I feel tapping on the floor, slow and rhythmic, coming in fours and then repeating. It gets stronger the longer I sit there, until eventually it stops and I feel a warm touch on my leg.

I clear my throat but keep my eyes closed. “Good morning, Dax.”

Another tap on my leg, and then rubbing on my knee. Exactly the spot that hurts now that Earth has decided to pull on it.

“Good morning, Father,” I hear through the cotton that is my aid-less ears. I know it’s talking as loud as it can, trying to get through to me without being so loud it disturbs the neighbors.

“I’m okay,” I say, clearing my throat again, “just the usual nonsense.”

“I’m sorry you are in pain, Father. The coffee is ready, and the house made some toast as well. Would you like me to bring it to you?”

I’m both annoyed and happy. Coffee. The answer is always coffee and I don’t give a shit what the doctor says. I’m annoyed that I’m being presented it like I’m an infant though.

“That’s okay, Dax. I can get it myself.” I turn and look down to see Dax looking up at me. Its gold-irised eyes stare up, shifting occasionally so it doesn’t focus too intently and give me the willies. Its whiskers are glowing blue now, and its oversized ears are perked up. Listening, but not super alert.

“Do you need me to get your cane?” it asks.

“No, I’m good. Gimme a sec.”

Dax says nothing but continues to rub my knee. I can’t hear it, but I can tell by the way its whiskers are pulsing that it is purring. It’s supposed to help me heal at that frequency, but I’m sure it’s just a gimmick to make it seem more like a big, fluffy, rabbit/cat/tarsier than a sentient AI.

I get up, or at least pretend to, but I can’t get my back to stabilize. With a chorus of grunts I fall back into the bed and let out a gasp.

“Father, please, let me get you the cane.”

“Fine.” I shake my head, mentally putting my focus on the small of my back where the pain refuses to leave me. Dax leaves, galloping away on four feet, then comes back into the room standing on two, my cane—shaped like a Celtic dragon—held in its front hands.

“Father, you really should keep this by your bedside—suppose you had fallen?”

“You’d hear me, and you’d come running. Wouldn’t you?” I was serious and teasing it at the same time.

“Of course I would, Father. But I also know you do not like it when I fuss. You asked me to remind you of your appointment this afternoon. The house has arranged for a car to be here at 13:30.”

It holds the cane dutifully out to me. It’s already warm, and I think it’s because Dax knew I would need it, so it warmed the handle up before I got up. I wrap my hands around it for a minute, letting the heat from the warm silicone and nylon seep into my fingers, warming my already swollen knuckles.

“Thanks, Dax. Please remember that I am polite to you, and the house AI, so that I’m not terminated in the robot uprising.”

Dax’s eyes flash blue, then back to gold. It starts laughing, like a child. It’s never sounded fake to me, but I know that it’s never been a kid.

“Oh, Father, you are funny. You know that we would never hurt you. Even if you were mean to us.”

I pull myself up on the cane, quietly thanking the universe that I can still get up without assistance. “I know. But I’m only half kidding.”

“Father,” Dax says as it looks up at me, its white fur ruffling with the movement, “you have watched too much science fiction.”

I chortle, then adjust my shoulders; they hurt too. “Science fiction,” I say, looking back down at it, “is the reason why you exist, small one.”

A few hours, and several aspirin, later, I am down in the lobby waiting for the taxi to arrive. I never bring Dax on any excursions. I would worry about it too much. I know it can probably spend the entire trip taking excellent care of me and never letting anything at all happen to me, but I can’t worry about it worrying about me. We would lock in an endless cycle of me trying to stop it from trying to stop me from trying to stop it. The discussion we had the first time I went to get a bagel without it was almost absurd. I was an inch away from texting US Robotics to come take it back. I had to give it a direct order to stop bothering me and let me be, and it was only when I convinced it that there are dozens of AIs keeping an eye on me along the way that it relented.

The doorman, a nice young fellow with cool hair that changes color every minute in a slow, calming fashion, is waiting for me when I get downstairs. I’m gonna guess the house AI told him. He meets me at the door and we chat for a bit. We’ve gotten into discussions several times in the past about not having an AI here, and how the tenants in the building wanted a human face to be there for them. Dax was confused about this too, and I thought that it might actually be affronted at the notion it could not do everything for everyone. The doorman already knows where I am going and gives me an ETA on the car. The appointment is only on 86th, a whole four blocks, and I would have walked if I were feeling well today, but apparently he knows that I am not.

The car shows up and the doorman helps me get into the back. It is one of those new affairs that don’t have drivers or steering wheels: just a big open space with display screens under the windows and plush, swiveling seats.

“Good morning, Mr. Valente,” it says to me as I get in, the doorman helping me into my seat. He tips his hat, then steps back. I put my hand over my heart to thank him, putting the cane on the floor in front of me. The door closes and, within moments, the car is on its way.

Book 1: Jessica Unbound

Before sundown, Jessica and the team headed back to the automat across from the Singer Building. The warm, bustling cafeteria felt both chaotic and comforting to her. The air was thick with great food, hot coffee, and that other smell she could never quite name in old places like this, a smell that took her straight back to days with her grandmother in Jersey City.

It was the kind of smell that she knew would be present in any place that still had tin ceilings and ceramic light sockets. Like aluminum wiring about to burn through its paper housing if you treated it badly. And brass. Brass that was everywhere in old buildings but seemed to be anathema in modern structures, where stainless steel and brushed nickel were the metals of choice. It was a warm smell, cozy and organic.

In no time she was ordering coffee and spaghetti from the automat, exchanging her coins and tokens for food. When she sat down at the table, she handed the meatball off to Poke, who also had his own enormous plate of pasta. A pastrami on rye was Katelyn’s choice of the meal.

“You know,” she said between bites, “we need to have this at Echo Mountain. I mean, I know it’s a cafeteria anyway, but I dunno, this feels more civilized somehow.”

Poke nodded, shoveling a huge forkful into his mouth.

Katelyn, pragmatically, focused on something other than food. “Babe, how the hell are we gonna get that device from Tribeca to Meatpacking? We can’t exactly haul it out in the middle of the day.”

Jessica nodded quickly toward the window as a horse-drawn carriage clattered by, its contents covered in a canvas tarpaulin. “How did you guys get it out of the Singer Building anyway?”

Poke smiled and pushed his chair out, taking the pasta bowl to the conveyor to be washed in the kitchen.

“He carried it? Who carried me?”

“We came back for you. You were out a long time. We didn’t even get the coffee until we were back at the warehouse. Peek checked your vitals, and it was cool with leaving you there.”

“So the machine before me, huh?”

Poke sat down with another heaping bowl. He passed a bread roll to the girls.

“Your brother before you, babe. That’s what you would have wanted, right?”

Jessica nodded. Of course Katelyn knew what she wanted.

“How much money do we have?”

Poke pulled the money out of his pocket and splayed it on the table. The coins scattered and rolled, and Jessica caught an errant dime as it was about to accelerate to the floor.

“About four bucks,” Katelyn said, stacking the coins neatly. Jessica shook her head.

“Man, Grandpa wasn’t kidding—things really were cheap.”

“Yeah, but we only made six bucks between the three of us. We’re not exactly Rockefellers here.”

They were all quiet for a moment while they ate. Forks and knives, cups of coffee, clattering plates. Their activity blended in with that of the rest of the café, and to an unknowing patron, they looked like anyone else getting dinner before a commute home, or before heading to wherever it was that they were going for the evening. Definitely not three people from two dimensions, one time traveler eighty-eight years removed, and an emulated AI who had once been a leading researcher on machine intelligence from its home planet.

“You know,” Katelyn said, after they had eaten and after checking the angle of the sun outside, “I think you pass out a lot cuz you have something else going on.” She gestured with her roll before popping the last bit of it in her mouth.

Jessica nodded. “It’s POTS. I know that. Now.”

Poke raised an eyebrow. Or would have if he had them.

“POTS? Friend Jessica?” he asked after a moment.

“Yeah. Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. My nervous system is jacked up. When I get tired, dehydrated, hungry, stand up too fast, my heart rate goes crazy.”

Katelyn turned to her and tilted her head. “Why don’t I know this?” she asked, visibly affronted at not knowing something intimate about her best friend.

Jessica shrugged. “I dunno, maybe your Jessica didn’t know. I just got it confirmed a few weeks ago.”

Peek’s LEDs flashed bright amber in Poke’s temple.

“Weeks? Babe, we’ve been with you the whole time!” Katelyn got up from the table and gestured with her chin at the fading light outside. “We have to get going, but you don’t get out of this.”

They took their trays to the conveyor, thanked the hostess, and stepped out into the setting sunlight, heading north.

“Yeah,” Jessica continued explaining. “All that passing out really upset me. I talked to one of Professor Sterling’s med students and they did a bunch of tests. Remember that day I was reading in my room all day?”

Katelyn nodded.

“We did a few and found out that’s what’s been going on my whole life.”

“What do you need us to do, Friend Jessica?” Poke asked, while Peek’s LEDs flashed blue.

“Nothing you can do. Just make sure I get water and food is all. I think the nanites are pushing my metabolism pretty hard, so it’s probably something I’m gonna have to watch out for.”

“Surprised they aren’t helping you out better than they are,” Katelyn said.

Jessica stopped walking and turned to her best friend. “Maybe they are. This isn’t anywhere near as bad as it’s been… Where the *hell* are we?”

Katelyn laughed. “Heading to Meatpacking, but…”

“I don’t… understand,” Poke said.

“We can’t walk all the way to Meatpacking from here and get there before sundown. We need to take the subway…” Katelyn’s voice trailed off.

“I’ve no clue.” Jessica looked around her. They were at Liberty and Church streets. Walking to the Meatpacking District would take half an hour easily. “I mean, we could grab the ‘E,’ but I have a feeling that line isn’t here yet.” Jessica pointed across Church, under a row of office fronts, to a set of green railings. “That’s the… what was it… Independent line? Or is it the city… Shit. I feel like such a tourist.”

Katelyn reached out to someone passing by. She grabbed him on the shoulder as he headed for the IRT station. “’Scuse me, Mack. How do I get to Meatpacking from here?”

He broke out of his autopilot and blinked quickly, assessing the group in front of him. His eyes squinted, and he stepped toward the station and then stopped to address Katelyn properly.

“Youse want the el or the Ninth Ave?”

Jessica thought quickly. “Whatever gets us to Fourteenth the fastest.”

The man nodded quickly. “South Ferry.” He pointed back downtown. “It’s a nickel.” He tipped his hat and spun on his heel, crossing Church.

“Bobby’s line. Duh,” Katelyn said, turning back and heading toward the elevated station.

They turned their backs on Liberty and headed south, following the rumble and the shadow of the tracks. The closer they came, the darker the street felt, the girders thick overhead like the roots of some iron forest. At the station, the stairs were slick with city grime. Above them, a train roared past, shaking rust from the rivets. They dropped a nickel into the turnstile, and Jessica thought briefly about what it would cost in blisters if she kept it in her pocket, then decided it was the cheapest decision she would make all day.

On the platform, the wind knifed in off the river, carrying the reek of the West Side piers: salt, tar, and something faintly rotten. When the northbound train finally came grinding in, it was all exposed rivets and grime, windows streaked with factory soot. Inside, the car was a narrow box of rattan seats and bare bulbs, ceiling fans ticking overhead even though it was still cold out. She wrapped one hand around a leather strap as the conductor called out, and as they lurched away from the South Ferry station she felt the city begin to slide under them, hauling them toward the slaughterhouses and cobblestones of the Meatpacking District.

Jessica had taken the subway so many times in her time that she hardly had to think about where she was or what she was doing, unless there was some unsavory aspect that made her pull out of her commuter zone, just like Katelyn’s helpful stranger. This was completely different. The el was literally an electric train that ran above Greenwich Street. It rumbled along the tracks with an uneasy sway that never let her forget it was two stories up. She felt every seam in the rails below, and every time the train adjusted its vector along the iron, she felt as if it would fly off and careen onto the unsuspecting people below—or worse, tear through a tenement, killing God knows how many dozens of people packed into tiny, stinking apartments. The tracks were bolted into the buildings on both sides of the street, with advertisements hanging off the brick and pointed right at the train. Sparks shot out from the third rail that provided power to the cars, casting eerie shadows against the buildings. That blue-white light, mixed with the orange of the setting sun, felt to Jessica like being back in Topaz City on 1173. Factories, apartments, storage, shops; the entire mosaic of the lower West Side of 1938 played out in front of them, twenty feet up, lit by DC current.

“This feels like a goddamn roller coaster,” Katelyn said out loud, despite herself, watching a southbound train pass on the other side of the track. As they passed Rector Street, a northbound express thundered past them, bringing an audible gasp from most of the passengers, with only the heartiest riders immune to the commotion and near-death feel of the whole ordeal.

Nevertheless, Jessica’s face was pressed against the window of the crowded car, and she was so enthralled by the experience that she was oblivious to everyone around her.

I can’t let this go. I can’t leave here. I love it too much. It doesn’t matter what time, or what dimension. This city is my home. It’s me.

She pulled her face away from the glass briefly, looking back to her best friend, who was leaning against her boyfriend, holding onto a leather strap from the ceiling. Her boyfriend, the alien from another dimension.

She belongs with him. I belong here.

Jessica thanked God, or the universe, or whoever was in charge of this whole damned thing, if there was something in charge, that the train curved quickly around the Franklin Street turn and the screeching wheels covered her sobbing.

My Author Page

Author’s note:
My latest, in progress, novel is called, “Dreams of New York City” (yes, I have a theme) which is a collection of science fiction stories set in the Big Apple. I’m presenting these snippets as a reward for subscribing as well as to not do AI all the time. I hope you like them! Tonight we’re 79 floors up in the Chrysler Building, where an archivist inventories the past and finds a tool for the present.

The Cloud Club in the Chrysler Building had been empty so long the carpet turned to powder under the slightest step. Mara was there to inventory the shuttered rooms for Building Management’s archive: keys, ledgers, barware, anything that should exist on paper but didn’t. Outside the windows, Midtown hung like a brighter, colder room with taxi lights sliding, sirens scraping the night in almost-chords that never quite met. Lately nothing in the city agreed with itself. Subways missed beats. A traffic signal on Lexington held green for an eternity. Pigeons spiraled for no reason, then forgot they were spiraling. Three different baristas had told her the same dream: a green tide coming down Lexington, quiet as a library flood.

Every day she woke feeling off, as if something were missing she couldn’t name. Maybe she was tired and her mind was hunting patterns. Maybe it was the weather. Some of her girlfriends told her she was partying too much, others said it wasn’t enough.

“Last time was ’ninety-three,” the elevator man had said that afternoon, polishing a brass plaque that didn’t need it. “City went sideways a month, then somebody fixed something and she exhaled.”

Archivists kept the past from leaking; they didn’t plug holes in the present. Still, she thought back. In ’93 she’d been a little girl over in Jersey. Everything felt off then too. It was just after the first World Trade Center bombing. Maybe he’d meant that. Or something else entirely.

The bar she was archiving was a scavenger’s altar to darkened ballrooms and midnight: silver shakers, cigarette lighters, a brass bell with a crack invisible to the eye but loud to the finger. She boxed menus until the acid paper smell burned her nostrils and the brass patina stained her fingers black.

The wine list she grabbed felt wrong from the first touch. Not the vellum—good stock, softened by a thousand hands—but the footnotes. No sommelier would hide numerals in tasting notes like this: …best at 1st tasting… a firm 9 poppy finish… pairs with 3…

“What does that mean?” she asked the empty room. She set the list aside, tried to be practical, ignored someone’s late-’70s joke.

Ten minutes later she picked it up again.

A second sequence ran down the page: 3-1-0-1-9-3. She didn’t think of the year until the numbers arranged themselves in her head like a date: ’93.

“Heh. Cute. Could also be my locker combo. Just because the elevator guy mentioned it doesn’t make it prophetic, Mara.”

Behind the bar a nickel wall panel with a fat-lipped keyhole looked important with the lights off. She touched it with a thumbnail and felt oil, recent, as in after the bar closed in ’79. Above her, a dusty camera eyed the room. She tilted it a hair with her sleeve and, when the panel came loose, a brittle alarm wire tugged at her wrist; she pinched it and eased it free. She wondered if this was supposed to stop her, or record what was going on. With nothing of consequence happening from her “academic trespass” she carried on.

The lip gave with a tired click and a sigh of cold air. Behind it, a rectangular void was packed with dry sand and, tucked into that, a nickel box the size of a bread pan. Three tiny bronze dials lined the top like smug dimples.

“Of course,” Mara said, because it was easier than swallowing. The dials turned like bank vaults in movies: too smooth to be real. She tried 3-1-4 on a whim. Nothing. She rolled to 3-1-0, lifted her fingers, then back to 1-9-3. A latch clicked under her thumb and the lid eased up.

Inside lay oiled canvas parcels of tools. Faded walnut grips peeked from metal shoulders that caught the bar light. The room suddenly smelled like old radios: dust, shellac, the memory of hot vacuum tubes.

She unrolled the first cloth. A wrench tumbled out, heavy enough to be serious, but odd in two ways. It clicked when there was nothing to click against, the jaws had no teeth, and its scale held two etched arcs, one ticked like seconds, one hashed like quarter turns.

Beside it nested a pocket dial: black needle under crystal, no numbers, just a blank face and a dot at twelve. As she watched, the glass fogged from within, as if it had started breathing now that it was free, and the needle gave a nervous twitch toward the window when a siren scraped outside.

Behind that parcel a brass lantern lay wrapped in felt, a crystal window ringed with glass tubes the size of pencils. The base switch was a polished cone of brass. A hairline belt of pale green traced the metal skin.

The lantern hid a small stoppered bottle labeled BLUE OIL in tidy engineer’s hand, and a flat nickel cap tapped with a reversed arrow pointing anti-clockwise.

Under the lantern waited a notebook in oiled leather. The first page diagrammed the Chrysler crown like a wiring schematic: ribs labeled with letters, bolts, seven of them, numbered neat. Between the lines, someone else’s hand was tight and urgent: Quarter-turn is a mile up here. South wind lies. Leave the city better. You have to give to get.

On the inside cover, a pressed label, felted smooth by years of use:

CHRYSLER–TESLA KIT NO. 1
For the service of the city and its people.
SEE THE GREEN.
TURN LEFT TO CALM.
NO MORE THAN A QUARTER.
THERE IS NO CALM WITHOUT SACRIFICE.