Her training started tomorrow. She’d have to postpone her place (if they even let her), and decline the goddamn governmental birth bonus because otherwise she’d have to pledge giving up work for five years. She and Cole would have to scramble funds for childcare. Naomi would have to hope that by the time she could return to the workforce six months to a year after birth, some other expert in astro-hydroponics didn’t sneak into the spot they may or may not hold for her. Especially if said new expert was male and wouldn’t be leaving a babe at home. She wouldn’t stand a chance.

Naomi threw the stick against the shower tiles. It hit with a smack and clattered into the tub. She paced through her new apartment, in a nice part of Houston, half an hour’s drive to Clear Lake and the Johnson Space Center.

Think. Think. What are my options?

She’d bought the test with cash, kept her face away from the cameras as much as possible.

It didn’t make sense to bring a new child into the world when Earth only had thirty, forty years left. Naomi had gone to her high school friend Lynn’s baby shower the previous year. She couldn’t help but ask Lynn why she’d gotten IVF. Lynn had shrugged a shoulder, her stomach already distended—she was having twins. She’d have to pay the additional child tax on one of them, which wasn’t cheap. The IVF would have been a pretty penny, too.

“Earth has been thirty years from dying for twenty years,” Lynn had said. “It’s going to stay thirty years off forever, just to scare us into recycling.”

Lynn had been surrounded by other expectant or recent mothers, children playing in the shade out back. Naomi had felt out of place as the one attendee not even dating anyone at the time, much less married or thinking about kids. It was as if Naomi had blinked and everyone her age was having children. Like there was some sort of unspoken pact Naomi had broken.

If you were reading the signs closer, Naomi had wanted to say, you would realise this time, thirty years is likely the best-case scenario. Wars had broken out due to the ever-increasing waves of people displaced by climate change, with many countries shutting down their borders through force. Refugee aid programs were cut left and right, leaving philanthropists like Valerie to plug the funding gaps. Naomi didn’t have the heart to tell Lynn that if things didn’t change, those babies in her belly might not make it to middle age.