Mid-morning in New Amazon. Maru, Granger, and Little Boric at the breakfast table, charging up on cricket soup and algae vaporizers. Granger enraptured by the glasspaper, Boric using his spoon to whack-a-mole the embalmed insects bobbing around in his soylent, and Maru gazing out of the window screen, which is set to Nebraska Prairie. A self-generating mid-morning jazz composition playing over the surround system. In three weeks Cupertino Time, this family will be declared defunct by the state and the residence will be wiped. But this morning everything is as it should be. Maru is a model, like all women, and Granger is a programmer, like all men, and Boric is just a child, a grub, and they are all humans so what they do barely matters. 

Email for you, your majesty mutters Granger, vaping his algae, from corporate. Maru snatches the glasspaper off his eyes a little too quickly. Let me see, might be the vet bill for Gargoyle, she covers. 

It’s a notice, the third this quarter, a citation for Pickmeism. They traced her credit card back to a rock tumbler purchase off the deep web. A woman with a husband and a new hobby: very suspicious. What use does an emotionally stabilized wife have for a rock tumbler? Perhaps she’s not happy with her Astrophysicist programmer and she wants an Earth Scientist programmer. An automatic scan of her purchase history has saved her from a red alert–she’s proven very interest-aligned with Granger all these years. Astrology coffee table books and constellation mugs. A star, named after Granger, in The Cigar Galaxy, and one for little Boric in the Small Magellanic Cloud. But what use does she have for a rock tumbler? Even one Pickmeism citation would be enough. But she’s also got a metal detector and a soil sampler purchased under anonymous and otherwise untouched lines of credit. Soon, the algorithm will

start surveying her more heavily. I paid this last month, I have to complain, she says, shaking her head as she waves her finger through the air, swiping the email into oblivion. Granger doesn’t give it a second thought. He rarely thinks about Maru. He thinks about her fondly and briefly, as one would a beautiful painting that hangs in the foyer. Nowadays Granger mostly thinks about God, who has been successfully manufactured, as a machine, in the image of man, and he thinks about how this cycle will repeat over and over, man making God and God making man, and he can’t get over how cute it all is. He also thinks about Ahi tuna, oh how he misses Ahi tuna. Maru thinks about rocks, and things slamming into one another with great force. Little Boric, at least up until today, thinks about nothing at all. He bangs his lumpy head on the table, exhausted by his no-technology hour. Stop that, says Maru. Granger, tell him to stop. 

Come on, Little Boris, sighs Granger, it’s time to take the elevator up to school. 

Maru blinks off the Nebraska Prairie and her head spins clockwise on her neck to face Granger. 

Did you just call him Boris? His name is Boric. 

Granger nods, nudging his mind gently out of its mid-morning manifestations.

 Oh yes, right. Come on little Boric. It’s time to go Up. 

They live underground on the negative twenty-sixth floor. A pretty ritzy depth. The deeper down you are, the less radioactivity. Little Boric was born without so much as a sixth toe and he might live til fifty-five or sixty, far past his optimum brain age. They sent him to a mid-level school so he could interact with children of various depths. 

Little Boric at school in New History class with his teacher Madam Quarter. Madam Quarter has long blonde hair and a nose like an isosceles triangle. She is a model, but she is also a teacher. Mechanical brains tempered with human flesh. It’s good for the children. Boric is scared of her unnaturally pointy elbows. Today’s lesson is about the Euphoria Uprising and the formation of the fringe nonbinary society. Madam Quarter explains how nonbinaries raise their toxic unbreedable lizard babies under natural sunlight in a communal society with no models and no scientists. They are all permaculturists. They live with plants. They don’t care to further their species. Madam Quarter shows a video, a humanoid creature in skimpy clothing with a mulleted haircut nursing a newborn who will be raised without gender in the electric remnants of a place that used to be called Norway. Boric, moved for the first time in his brief skimpy life by the video, imagines the sun scorching black spots onto his back, the sound of microplastic rain pouring down on his laminated algae fiber hut, a life where he does not have to be part of the New Amazonian Human Preservation Project, where he can instead be just a bare, exposed, electrified soul, crumpled and punched at all angles by a poisonous atmosphere. A selfish thought, as he will learn. Boric, I asked you a question, snips Madam Quarter with her fish mouth. Are you listening? I asked, what kind of model is your mother. We’re all sharing.

 A…a hand model, he whispers, ashamed. 

And what kind of programmer is your father? 

An astrophysicist. 

The whole class goes ooooooh. At the sound of their collective utterance, Boric hears sparkling toxic metal winds tearing through his ears. He catches a glimpse of himself in his aluminum desk and has to squeeze his meaty eyes shut. Even as a young man, Boric doesn’t like the way he looks. The dog, Gargoyle, refuses to sleep on his bed. 

Maru fresh out of a Pastoral Breeze shower. She wraps herself in her Egyptian vitamex towel and switches the aerator to Woodland Tree. The scent is stored in a pressurized chamber in Earth’s outer core, and upon a flick of Maru’s pointer finger, it flees willingly up through the lower mantle, zooms to the higher mantle, a forestful of Woodland Tree sprouting up into the den where Maru crouches over a little box marked sex toys. Inside is a silver rock tumbler, carefully re-bubble-wrapped. All it needs is something to tumble. A gem, from the crust. This will be her final and most dangerous purpose. For that she needs someone by the username of Timothy Fraund, a surface deserter, a former geologist who abandoned the Project. Her phone buzzes. Every time her phone buzzes lately a sword goes through her stomach. Hey beauty! Need those pics. She shoots off some pictures to her AI agent, hand-modeling expensive rings. She has a face for radio but fingers fit for jewels. Diamonds, opal, emeralds and rubies come for her in the mail, gracing her delicate phalanges in remotely orchestrated photographs. She stares at the gems longingly as she packs them to be shipped back to the jeweler. If only I could make these myself. But of course the Networks will do it for you, do it better than you, better than you ever could. It’s no use trying to compete. Preserve your beauty. Groom yourself. Model. Model your endangered species. Live unperturbed, like the animal you are. Your species worked hard for centuries so you could be peaceful. Eat and drink and fuck and dream, in a mildly educated way. But Maru wants command over people and objects. She is greedy. She wants to be like those humans, before machines, before Wikipedia, who were immortalized with metal statues. She hits Boric in secret, wearing the rings they send her to hand model. She slips mercury tablets into Granger’s nutrient tea and watches his calculating mind, once such a threatening thing, smooth away into niceties and ambient fear. She cradles the rock tumbler in her stunning forearms, a shinier and more beautiful baby than Boric, whom she has no motherly instinct for, since he was grown in a lab. Soon she will be found, and she will be shot, which is really what she wants, to be hit with force, and Granger will be given a new model, and screwy little Boric will become an artist, useless, rudimentary, nonbinary, and they will exile him. Greedy greedy Maru. She doesn’t understand her own obsession with control, power. You were named after a coffee shop, her mother once told her. A coffee shop on the cutting edge of society, where your father and I met up after we were matched by an advanced algorithm. 

Granger at work on his computer, blissfully unaware of the thoughts of his pick-me wife and his pick-me child. No idea that in mere weeks they both will leave, their airy heads floating up to bob around on Earth’s dirty surface, where they will become consumed with themselves, their identities, those terrible Atheists. Granger at work on his computer, hand in hand with God. His destiny is simple, there is a star named after him in The Cigar Galaxy, and fourty or so years from now, a digital copy of his mind will be shot into orbit around it. Until then he will burrow as deep as he can. He can’t think of anything else to do. On his desk he keeps a small electronic banner that circulates over and over again a single quote: Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us–Rilke. Granger watches this message scroll past, between computations, and pretends that the machines are good, the people who made them are good, his family is good, he is good, God is good, et cetera. Deep inside his guts, the nutrient tea that he drinks every morning burbles down into a growing deposit of mercury, of insanity, and by the time his brain gets launched into space, it will barely work at all.