I don’t know what the hell I want. I want my life back the way it was supposed to be. Jun-ha should be in his junior year of high school and starting to think about college. Soo-ha should be an eager and awkward teenager. Don and I should be living together in a house with a dog or something.

Instead, I live in a hive with no yard and no privacy. My husband is absent. My only living child wants to abandon me. My work is for shit, all our regulations and laws going obsolete or backfiring before they can have a real, positive effect.

Maybe Kanata-san is right. Maybe I should give up and start fresh. Can’t go more clean-slate than moving to a station colony. He says he can sponsor all three of us as a family unit.

JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, DECEMBER 1, 2090

So it’s settled.

I’m leaving Earth.

Don and I will somehow have to learn to live with each other—and the angry teenager in our midst. I can’t help but feel that I’ve failed everyone, Soo-ha especially. The things she says… I know she’s lashing out, but there are shards of truth embedded in her words, and they hurt.

I’ll be working as the Eko-Yi’s only bioethicist. They need one, so says Kanata-san, for whatever it is they’re doing. Now that the colony stations are mostly independent of Earth’s jurisdiction, all we hear or see is what they tell us. Guess I’ll find out the truth once I’m there.

JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, MAY 17, 2091

On arrival at Eko-Yi, we’ll get new names in line with Neo-Buddhist dharma. We can choose or we can ask one of the monks to give us one, so of course I asked Kanata-san. So did Don, but Soo-ha wanted to choose her own. Something more “fierce,” says my girl.

My new name will be Ao Tara. He says I will understand why if I meditate on it long enough.

We launch in a week. A week!

WELGA

18. We build AIs to solve problems that we define. We have not given them a sense of self-actualization, and the oligarchy manipulates our fear to prevent us from wanting to. We wrap this in the guise of ethics, as if our current enslavement of machine intelligences is acceptable until we give them the desire to be free.

—The Machinehood Manifesto, March 20, 2095

“Holy shit!” Welga shrank the journal.

Her exclamation woke Olafson. He cocked a bleary eyebrow at her.

“According to her journal, Josephine Lee is also Ao Tara, the station council leader on Eko-Yi!”

Olafson’s gaze blanked for a couple of seconds as he accessed his feed. “The one whose talk had similarities to the Machinehood’s manifesto. And Josephine Lee is… Jun-ha Park’s mother.”