His name was Jaswinder Bhattacharya. He was twenty-two years old, and he was the most famous orphan in the solar system. He was the son of the woman who had designed the engines that drove the fastest spaceships and the man who had solved the root module salt accumulation problem for large-scale microgravity agriculture. Padmavati Bhattacharya, his aunt, was one of the most powerful Councilors in the United Councils of Earth, with a position so elevated few people had any true idea what she did. Bhattacharya himself was an astronomer who studied the life cycle of galaxies, with a focus on the quasars at their centers. It was a rather esoteric and impractical field for the son of people who had done so much to propel modern humanity back into space.

He was the only survivor of the House of Wisdom massacre. My father’s massacre, or so the world believed.

Ten years ago, four hundred and seventy-seven people had died aboard House of Wisdom, victims of a biological attack that had unleashed a fierce and fatal engineered virus known as Zeffir-1 into the ship’s atmospheric control system. The system’s air filters had been upgraded right before my father left the ship; the virus had struck right after. Captain Ngahere and the Deep Space Archaeology research team had accused him of hoarding data and hiding results for his own personal glorification. And, years before, my father had written a series of papers about Pre-Collapse biological warfare. It was a frail web of circumstantial facts and feeble accusations, none of them proof, but it was all the evidence SPEC and the Councils needed. They never looked for another culprit.

Bhattacharya turned his head. I glanced away quickly—but he was looking past me, through the window to the elegant spine of the space tether, to the Earth below.

I turned to see what he saw. The clouds, the seas, the continents. Cities scarring the landscape. The quicksilver glints of shuttles and transports reflecting the sun. I had not wanted to look, and now I could not look away.

Four hundred years ago, after generations of war, famine, plague, and environmental destruction, a small group of people trapped aboard an orbital weapons platform had unleashed their payload to detonate in the atmosphere. They had meant to destroy Earth, to put it out of its human-inflicted misery, but they failed. Humanity survived. The planet slowly recovered. Governments re-formed, then joined together beneath the umbrella of the Councils. Humans returned to space.

We were supposed to be proud of that. We were supposed to cherish the second chance we had been given. We were supposed to be better now. We were supposed to think it could never happen again. But those of us who had forged our own freedom in Earth’s lingering scars knew differently.

Mankind will never change, Adam often said, his favorite opening to our nightly meetings. So we must make our own fate.