She sits cross-legged on her king-size bed (again, too big) with a series of tablets arrayed in a semicircle around her, holographic images and charts springing up from them in glimmering blue. In one display, a three-dimensional diagram of a human brain rotates with annotations spitting out from it, noting which part of the brain controls which functions. On another tablet, she scrolls through a number of memory disorders: amnesia, hyperthysemia, Korsakoff’s syndrome. With each, a part of the first image grows red. On a third tablet, a newscaster drones through the catalog of daily updates on Alabast: the upcoming graduation ceremony for the latest class of students at the Institute and the preparations being made on the street level, the rising rate of homeownership given the recent influx of Colonists from the Nordic bloc Colonies. A small blip of news about an attack involving a recent immigrant from one of the outposts that served as home to fourth- and fifth-generation Earthland refugees from what was once Southeast Asia on Earth. It bothers Ify how the descendants of some Earthland refugees tend to live only among their own, as though clinging to the memory of the tragedy that befell their ancient homes is some act of bloody solidarity. Wars, rising waters, invasions, nuclear disasters. Too many catastrophes to count. Carnage caused by other humans and by the Earth itself. You’ve already left Earth behind, Ify wants to tell them, leave behind the past as well. She thinks back to the people of Centrafrique and the half-built structures, how so much of the capital seemed under construction, all gilded in possibility. Glowing with potential. Be like them, she wants to say to them, to those other migrants from Earthland who insist on speaking Ixcatec or Mayan in honor of a homeland that’s now nothing but deforested, irradiated desert. Be like them, she wants to tell those from the Russian Federation who insist on building monuments in their Colonial enclaves to heroes that, in Ify’s mind, should remain lost and forgotten.

Be like me, she realizes she’s saying.