Most of their education was comprised of science, math—and some pre-Comeback history, which trickled in piecemeal. Even when she was young, Park got the feeling that whatever history they were taught about that era was heavily edited: any mention of the Comeback, with its two phases of natural purging disasters and unstoppable plant growth, was paired heavily with descriptions of how the ISF had saved them all, how foresighted it’d been to build the first colonies in space. The infrastructures of the previous centuries had not been equipped to deal with a catastrophe like the Comeback. Countries were wiped off the map, their borders eradicated by the plants. When the roads were overtaken, or the weather phenomena had devastated too many population centers, the previous governments had simply . . . collapsed. Like a chair buckling under too much weight. Legs breaking off in showers of sawdust. The workers, the firemen, the emergency services all went to hell—and then the whole planet had been swallowed. How could anyone have fought it? People could stave off predators, human enemies, even machines—but not the planet itself. In the end it was better to chalk the whole thing up to a loss, move to some newer, untainted planet, and start over, away from the insidious encroachment of the Earth’s assault. Do as the ISF did, and thrive in a vacuum where human life didn’t have to compete with plants.

Thank God for the Interstellar Frontier, Park echoed, a little bitterly. Amen.

Other than the proselytizing, not much else was said about life before or during the great catastrophe. Better not to dwell in the past, Park figured. Better not to plant seeds of longing, or nostalgia—it would only do good to look forward, not back. Pains were taken to avoid embittering people about their present circumstances. The curious, then, were forced to scrape bits and pieces of history together from old filmstreams, from rumors passed around on media platforms by so-and-so’s great-grandfather about a time when everyone could drive cars and there were things called “parks” around: great open squares of grass where people did cartwheels and had picnics and lay around in the sun. Park found this last tidbit funny—that a park had once been something that was open and exposed.

The rest of their lessons were geared towards tradecraft, any labor that still couldn’t be done by robots and androids. Most of the students’ futures lay in the workshops and factories of the last surviving cities. Or, if they were lucky, in the robot design firms, or the therapy hotels, or the law and dispute centers and the writing and idea mills.