Romy raised her eyebrows. The cadet was good. Usually, they fumbled through everything. It was unsettling, the influx of information when you were first removed from your cultivation tank.

These lectures were for the fresh cadets, but Romy could hear the same material fifty times—she probably had—and still want to hear it again. The current information about what was happening on Earth was limited. It arrived in a slow trickle as only a tiny portion of their force could be spared from station duties for research. And so Romy enjoyed sitting in here. It made her feel like there was at least a bit of progress.

Earth’s people were no more. Earth as it had been was gone—no matter how similar the Earth of today looked from the orbito windows. The Earth humans took nature for granted, and two industrial revolutions caused the greenhouse gas levels to rise so dramatically, the damage couldn’t be reversed.

The good news? Their home would one day be inhabitable again. In approximately 850 years. For now, it was a waiting game. Or should have been, if the current conditions on Earth didn’t present the perfect habitat for the Critamal.

“Global warming is like having a jacket on that you can’t take off. Heat can get in, but can’t get out,” came another boy’s wobbled answer.

Romy’s heart gave a pang at the twelve-year-old’s uncertainty. He was so fresh, he probably still had the amniotic gel gunk from the tanks up his nose. Before you had time to get it out you were thrown into warfare training, and then rushed into battle. At that point there were only four pathways available to you: get blown to smithereens in battle and never see Earth; survive an explosion and be taken hostage by the Critamal; survive an explosion and be saved by the Orbitos as the sole survivor of your knot, minus your sanity—which was worse than death in Romy’s opinion; or, if you were lucky, you might just reach the ripe age of thirty-five, where you would re-enter the cultivation tanks, have your genetics upgraded, undergo a memory wipe, and emerge ready for another round two years later.

Like most soldiers, Romy was grateful for the memory wipe—or the “merciful wipe”. To live in this life for a thousand years was no life at all. To remember it all—every battle, every bit of space junk, and every dead comrade while Earth was dangled before you year after year after year—that would be more than she could bear.

In the 150 years since the orbitos were initially launched, Romy might have lived four or five times. And one day, if she was luckier than she had any reason to be, she would plant both feet on her homeland and all the debris clean-up, the repeated life cycles, and the gel gunk from the tanks would have been worth it.