Naomi twisted in her seat, the dress stiff, and introduced herself to the others at her table. She knew the Hawthorne employees, Liam and Bryony. Liam had the hangdog eyes of a beagle, and Bryony was over six feet tall and delighted in towering over others. Bryony was a doctor, working on astronaut health and immunology, and Liam was in public relations. The strangers were a hard-faced man from the Environmental Protection Agency named Bram and his much kinder-looking wife, Theresa.

Naomi spoke to Bryony primarily, as they’d at least worked together a few times. Bryony’s eyes were bright, shining. “We’re getting closer,” she said. “Can’t you feel it?” She’d always been an ardent supporter of Valerie’s.

Naomi was spared from too much small talk when Valerie tinged her fork against a glass, bringing the murmur of talk to a close. Valerie had taken her place at the head table.

“Welcome,” she said, her voice carrying easily thanks to the acoustics of the room, “to the Hawthorne charity dinner. The proceeds tonight go to vital support services for those displaced by the growing pressure of climate change.” A rough scattering of applause, a few smiles.

“I aim to help those in the here and now,” Valerie continued. “But my vision has always been to the future. Fixing a root cause rather than slapping a band-aid over the symptom.”

Some of the smiles in the audience dimmed. Naomi wondered how many people in the ballroom wearing designer suits and jewels actually gave anything resembling a crap for the refugees. People too poor to afford the subscription fees for a luxury like the internet, much less the even higher costs needed to live a comfortable life: dues to private police or firefighters or health insurance. So many lived in ramshackle housing little better than shanty towns. They didn’t count as permanent addresses, so most couldn’t register to vote. They were becoming increasingly invisible. Meanwhile, the people in this room showed up and donated pennies of their wealth to give the illusion they cared.

“We are working hard, at long last, to try and escape the damage we’ve done to Earth. First, we looked to the moon. Decades ago, men had taken their first steps there, which are still imprinted in the grey regolith. Robots went back next, and then humans added new footprints.”

Naomi had grown up seeing photos of the base of bubbles like an unnatural growth on the pockmarked face of the moon.

“But we abandoned the moon when we’d realised how expensive it was for so little gain. So we turned our attention to Mars, inhabiting it with the descendants of Curiosity, Rover, Perseverance, Spirit.

“NASA, in conjunction with China, Russia, Europe, and Japan are doing excellent work on their terraforming of Mars. But that project will take decades, maybe even up to a century, and, frankly, we don’t have that long.”