“Like me?” Peaches said and gave a small chuckle. “I’m just a laptop farmer.”

“Oh, I hear you’re a lot more than that. The folks at Pioneer and Monsanto say you’ve been behind some of the biggest breakthroughs in the industry.”

“I have?”

“You’re not one of those people who’s always deflecting compliments are you, Isaac? Because you should really take credit for what you’re capable of.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he just opened and closed his mouth several times.

“I hear they call you Superboy?”

“I—yeah.” He felt his cheeks coloring with a warm blush. “Yeah, they call me that.”

She took a step closer, clicking the asphalt with her heels. She smelled like one of those shops in the mall that sold all the lotions. He couldn’t tell how old she was, maybe thirty-five or maybe fifty-five. But she looked at him with such penetrating eyes that he felt jellied in her presence.

“How’d you like to be a Superman with us?”

“I would—I think—I like—that could be—sure—yeah—okay—neat.”

She motioned toward his house. “I hate to be a busybody bother, but maybe you should invite me in? We could have a Diet Coke and get acquainted. I think you’ll find the opportunities we offer to be just as lucrative as the private sector, but you’ll be serving your country instead of a corporation, and wouldn’t that be nice? Especially in this time of global uncertainty? We need all the good soldiers we can get.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding his head until he thought it would fall off. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

An hour later, he had said yes again by signing the contract she produced. And he was glad to escape a job that, as Director Ricketts put it, seemed intent on screwing over farmers and polluting waterways and seeding cancer—until he wasn’t.

For the next year, he worked on a campus of what he thought of as gray Lego bricks—windowless, featureless office buildings made from concrete. Level-four security clearance. Bordered by fences, patrolled by drones and guards, hidden away in the moss-draped woods southeast of Seattle, the toothy peak of Rainier rising in the distance.

In the time before, scientists estimated that 86 percent of life’s species had yet to be fully described. Now that number has swollen. They were a long way from fully understanding what was growing in their own backyard, let alone the bottom of the ocean or the depths of the Amazon. The meteor shower had dropped its seeds and the U.S. government had collectors roaming the globe for samples. There were other DOD campuses stationed throughout the country, but this one specialized in the alien flora introduced by the comet.