Rebooting Eden
My latest short story out now - speculative fiction in the Glitchfall Continuum universe
Rebooting Eden, my latest short story, was inspired by a sense of how our increasingly tech-enhanced lives tend to infantilize and “narcissize” each of us—to the point where mutualistic and egalitarian contact with our fellow humans can feel inordinately fraught and tiresome. When I think infantilizing, my mind wanders to the ubiquitous store-bought coffee—our modern-day worker-warrior accoutrement— that reminds me so much of a toddler’s sippy cup. I also wonder how all this plays into the shift away from permanent one-on-one coupling, what with the compromise and putting someone else first that partnership can tend to demand. As such, I was interested in speculatively exploring how tech spoils us by indulging our every whim, almost as if we were royalty from a bygone era. I take this idea to a futuristic extreme in Rebooting Eden.
A quick blurb:
What happens when the last humans are dragged out of their simulated paradise and forced back into a broken world?
Queen Rayvnn—a post-singularity human who has ruled her virtual dream palace for centuries—is yanked from bliss and into the unpleasant realities of an aging space station with 25 other beings made flesh again. DNA degradation has stopped their perpetual cloning cycle in its tracks, threatening the species with extinction. But just as importantly to these denizens, it has jostled their sense of limitless power and comfort, privileges afforded to them within their sim spheres. Can they truly be asked to relate to their fellow human beings in all their awkward messiness—particularly in a sexual way? Or have they become so accustomed to the glossy indulgences of the realms they rule, that they are willing to forfeit humanity’s future? What begins as a reboot for humanity quickly devolves into absurd speed-dates, failed intimacy rituals, and cringeworthy nostalgia.
It’s darkly funny, bittersweet, and a story that’s been turning around in my imagination for decades now. So happy to share it with you now.
You can read the full story here:
Below is a short excerpt to give you a taste. Enjoy.
In the radiant blush of spring’s first light, Queen Rayvnn rode sidesaddle through her lower orchards, a feline-shaped standard fluttering behind her and the scent of honeysuckle catching in her silks.
The cherry blossoms were perfect—too perfect. As always. As ever. Behind the Queen trailed a chittering entourage of courtiers, pages, and her favorite lady-in-waiting, Mirelle, who was attempting to catch up while wrangling a stubborn mechanical peacock.
It was Rayvnn's Day of Fragrance—a holiday she had invented to justify steeping in the sensory pleasures of buttery creams, oil baths, scented candles, and aromatic concoctions for imbibement. By royal decree, no reports, complaints, or messages were to disturb her revelry.
From the hillside, her castle—spindled, crystalline and entirely simulated—sparkled in the algorithmic sunlight. Each spire housed a personal realm: dream gardens, orgone chapel, pools of indulgence, spectral circus, as well as archives of her past iterations. She had ruled for lifetimes here, and though she had no subjects beyond her fellow avatars, she governed with flair. Some still remembered the time she banished an entire subplot involving dragons, declaring it "narratively stagnant."
This morning, however, a flutter of dread poked through her joy. She couldn't place it. Something behind the curtain of her constructed bliss was... blinking.
So when the messenger boy in dull courier brown slipped through the perimeter wards, he was met with the full force of Rayvnn's sigh. "He looks real," she said, muttering the word like a pejorative. She eyed him warily, a pesty bug on her favorite flower.
"Your Majesty," Mirelle whispered, catching up. "Should I have him flogged or just digitally erased?"
"Neither," the Queen replied sourly. "That would acknowledge his existence."
“By your command, my liege,” said Mirelle, backing away while still facing Rayvnn. The queen smiled at her lady-in-waiting’s over-the-top simpering—it gave her a naughty and jocular thrill.
Still, the boy’s existence insisted. He dropped to one knee, panting. "Ma’am—uh—Majesty. It's from the Interface. Code Gold. Absolute Recall."
The Queen’s lips tightened. Mirelle’s attempt at a joke—something about Code Gold sounding like a urinal mishap—fell flat.
Rayvnn abandoned her attendants with no explanation, pushing past several of them situated on the ground mid-bow as they prostrated themselves before her. Their undying obeisance typically tickled her fancy, the queen marveling to herself how the whole worship thing just never got old. Except for now, when her mind refused to be lulled by the adulation.
“Never mind, never mind,” she said as she knocked through them. She let out an exasperated groan, hating how her perfect serenity had been marred by the messenger’s interruption.
Through the west wing, up the spiral tower of reflected moonlight, and into the hidden chamber beneath the old observatory she went. There, in the hexagonal sanctum, she pressed her palm against the obsidian wall. A quiet beep. A flash of blue. The wall irised open.
Inside: a chair with bone-silver wiring, a crescent headset, and beneath the floor, the hum of cryostabilizers.
She lowered herself into the chair. A deep breath. A spoken phrase, old and forgotten: "Let the veil split."