Beyond The Dying Light

There was no planet quite like Aurelia. Everything ran on technology — not the clunky, visible kind that announced itself, but the kind that had been woven so deeply into daily life that most people had stopped noticing it was there at all. The streets were clean because systems kept them clean. Food appeared because systems produced it. The temperature held steady through summer and winter alike, never too hot, never too cold, adjusted constantly by the atmospheric shields that wrapped the planet like a second skin. Even the sky — that familiar silver-blue that Aurelians had looked up at their entire lives — was maintained, filtered, managed. A ceiling that behaved exactly as a sky should. The government controlled all of it. One government, governing everyone, everywhere on the planet, and nobody questioned that either — why would they? The systems worked. The food was free. The technology was free. Every few years a new device would appear in people's homes, compliments of the administration, and people would use it and be grateful and go on with their lives. Natan's alarm went off at seven, the same as always. He reached over, turned it off, and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Another boring day," he said, to no one in particular. He got up, stretched, and went downstairs. His mother was already in the kitchen, moving between the counter and the stove with the particular efficient energy of someone who had been awake for a while. She looked up when he came in. "Good morning. How was your sleep?" "Fine," Natan said. "Just fine?" "Fine, mom." She smiled at that and went back to what she was doing. Natan washed his face at the sink and looked over at the stove. "What's the food?" "Pancakes and egg." He looked at the machine sitting on the counter. "You used the machine." His mother glanced at him. Then sighed — the sigh of a woman who had been having this conversation for several years and had accepted that she would continue having it. "Of course." "Ehh." Natan pulled out a chair. "I won't eat that." "Natan. You need to eat." "I want your actual cooking." He sat down with his chin in his hand. "It's a shame, honestly." His mother looked at him for a moment — exasperated, fond, the expression she made when she was trying to be stern and not quite getting there. Then the exasperation lost. She smiled, the warm unguarded kind. "Yes, yes. Next time." She reached over and pinched his cheek. "Natan is so cute." "Mom." He leaned away. "I'm seventeen." "Age has nothing to do with it." He ate the pancakes without further complaint, which was its own kind of concession, and then went to get his bag. His mother was waiting at the door when he came back downstairs, holding something out to him. He looked at it. A bento box, wrapped carefully. "Don't look at me like that," she said. "I know you. I know you hate the machine food." She pressed it into his hands. "Those pancakes were from the machine — this one I made myself. With special ingredients." He turned the box over. "What special ingredients." "Love." He felt the heat rise to his face immediately, which was humiliating. He tucked the bento into his bag and turned for the door. "Mom. Stop talking nonsense." "Have a safe trip," she called after him, with the voice of someone who had won something. Outside, Aurelia ran its usual morning routine without him. Turbos hummed past overhead — the two-wheeled flyers that most students used to get to school, cutting across the sky in clean arcs, quick and effortless. The streets below them were nearly empty because of it. Natan walked. He always walked. The turbo he owned sat in his room, untouched — government-issued, like everything else, which meant its systems were connected to the same network as everything else, and Natan had learned enough about networks to know he didn't want one monitoring his movements. His own legs were slower. He didn't mind. He was almost at the school gate when someone called his name from behind him. "Natan! Wait up!" He turned. Aria was jogging to catch up, her bag bouncing on one shoulder, her blond hair catching the morning light. She reached him slightly out of breath and fell into step beside him, looking him over immediately in the way she always did — cataloguing, checking, the habit of someone who'd known him long enough to read the things he didn't say. "Hello, Natan." Then, before he could answer: "Your clothes are wet from sweat." "Yes." "What did you do this morning?" He turned his face away slightly. "Walked." She looked at him for a moment — at the slight drag in his step, the faint shadows under his eyes. "You made something last night, didn't you." "Half the night," he said. "It's called a booster." "Half the night is the whole night, genius." He didn't answer, which was also an answer. Aria had known him since they were children, which meant she knew all the versions of him — including the one that built things in the dark when he couldn't sleep, and the reason behind it. She didn't push it. She just walked beside him, which was what she'd always done. "You know," she said, as they reached the gate, "for someone living on the most automated planet in the known systems, you really do function like you're from three centuries ago." "Ancient people were more interesting," Natan said. Aria opened her bag with the look of someone about to exhibit something. Inside, nestled among her things, was a new device — sleek, clearly fresh from the latest government distribution. "Look what they sent this time. A mechanical pencil." She held it up. "You tell it what to draw and it does it. And there's a partner device that—" "Trash," Natan said. "I don't want to hear that from you!" She pouted, tucking it away. "Some of us appreciate things." He almost smiled. He didn't, but it was close. Their first class was space science. The teacher moved through the lesson with the practiced rhythm of someone who had given it many times, and Natan sat in his seat and paid attention in the way he paid attention to things that interested him — not visibly, but completely. "As of our current exploration record," the teacher said, moving through the projected display, "we have identified at least fifty planets that could support other forms of life. The search continues, but the numbers are promising." Fifty planets, Natan thought. Somewhere out there, fifty possibilities. He wrote it down without knowing quite why. The cafeteria was loud with the particular noise of a school at lunch — chairs scraping, trays clattering, the overlapping conversations of several hundred people eating at the same time. Natan grabbed Aria's sleeve as class ended and pulled her toward the door. "Hey—" she stumbled slightly. "Can you not just ask like a normal person?" "Let's go eat." "What is it with you? Can't you be nice about it?" "Aria. Food." "You're impossible." But she went with him. They found a table near the window and sat across from each other. Aria looked at his bag. "What did your mom make?" "Don't know." He opened it. The smell reached them both at the same moment — something warm and rich and genuinely good, the kind of food that announced itself. The meat was tender, cut cleanly, the sauce over the vegetables a deep amber. Even Natan, who rarely commented on food, went quiet for a second. "Natan." Aria was already leaning forward. "Give me some." He pulled it back. "No. Mom made it." She gave him the look — wide-eyed, pleading, entirely deliberate. "Just a little." "No." "Natan—" "I'll give you the vegetables." She made a face. "I don't want the vegetables." "Then you get nothing." "You're the only person on this planet who actually likes vegetables, you know that." She leaned back with her arms crossed, watching him eat. Then, after a moment: "You love your mom a lot." "Of course," he said, without looking up. Aria blinked. Something in her expression shifted — she'd expected him to deflect, maybe, or at least to look awkward about it. He just kept eating, completely unbothered. "Hey — shouldn't you be embarrassed? You just admitted that like it was nothing." Natan looked at her. "What's embarrassing about it?" She opened her mouth. Closed it. "I—" She looked away. "Just eat." "I was eating." "Fine. Give me some vegetables." "I thought you didn't want them." "Give me the vegetables, Natan." He gave her the vegetables. The school day wound down the way school days did, one subject folding into the next, until the final bell released everyone into the afternoon. Natan and Aria walked out through the gate together, and Aria stopped just outside it, tilting her face upward. "Do you feel that?" she said. "It's hotter today." Natan felt it. The warmth was wrong for the hour — more direct, less filtered, like something in the usual buffer had thinned. "Maybe maintenance," he said. "When did they last run it?" Aria thought about it. "I don't know. It's been up there for what — three hundred years? I don't think anyone's touched it." Three hundred years. Natan looked up at the silver-blue sky — that particular color that didn't exist anywhere else, that everyone on Aurelia had grown up under, that no one had ever questioned because it had always simply been there. Every person alive on this planet had been born under that sky. None of them had ever seen what was actually above it. He didn't know why that thought sat in him the way it did. He filed it away and started walking. — End of Chapter 1 —