short stories

The Cold Inequalities

The archiveship’s master index showed no change. It was Anzhmir’s duty to monitor the jewel-flicker of her freight of quantum blossoms in their dreaming, as well as the more mundane systems that regulated navigation, temperature, the minutiae of maintenance. The archiveship’s garden consisted of a compressed and sequenced cross-selection of human minds, everything from pastry chefs to physicists to plumbers. The selection was designed to accommodate any reasonable situation the colony-seed might find itself in, and a great many unreasonable ones as well.

Anzhmir had reached for the book’s address in memory, and found instead a wholly unfamiliar piece of lore. The discrepancy could only mean one thing: a stowaway.

Sf in Meeting Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan, in December 2015. Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1, ed. Neil Clarke. Thanks to Sonya Taaffe, Yune Kyung Lee, and Peter Berman for the beta.

“The Cold Equations” makes me cry every time I read it. It’s embarrassing! But that didn’t stop me from writing this story.