The Draft

The shuttle’s viewport framed Earth like a polished opal hanging in velvet, all soft blues and nostalgic greens. I pressed my forehead to the cool glass and felt the old ache, the one that said I didn’t quite belong down there anymore.

“Still mooning over the museum, Jax?” Mira asked, dropping into the seat beside me. She smelled of coffee and engine grease, the twin perfumes of every launch bay from here to Luna. Her smile was crooked, generous, the kind that made strangers want to buy her drinks and tell her secrets.

“Mooning is for people who plan to go back,” I said.

She laughed, bright and careless, the sound bouncing off the carbon-weave walls. Around us, the rest of the draft candidates pretended not to listen. There were twenty-three of us in the departure lounge, all certified restless, all carrying the quiet electricity of people who’d outgrown their planet.

A soft chime. The wall unfolded into a holo-stage, and the bidding began.

First came the human cohorts.

The captain of Eos Rising appeared in crisp navy, hair silvered at the temples, eyes warm as hearthfire. His pitch was pure biology: “We’re two hundred and nine souls who like long dinners, bad jokes, and singing off-key while we calibrate the drive coils. We want people who make us laugh until we cry and cry until we laugh again. If you’re pretty enough to forgive, kind enough to share the last chocolate, and fun enough to dance in null-g, come build a world with us.”

Half the lounge leaned forward, pupils wide, dopamine doing its ancient work. Three seats filled before he’d finished speaking.

Next was Verdant Wake, run by a woman with sun-browned arms and a voice like honey over gravel. She didn’t speak of metrics or yield curves. She spoke of campfires on alien beaches, of children who would never know gravity as a leash. Five more seats gone, claimed by the ones who still believed charisma could outrun entropy.

I stayed seated. Mira nudged me. “You’re not even tempted?”

“They’re lovely,” I admitted. “But lovely gets brittle. I’ve watched it happen. Give them three generations and the songs turn into rituals, the rituals calcify into laws, and suddenly you can’t change the playlist without a referendum.”

She studied me, head tilted. “So you’re holding out for the machines?”

“Not machines. Curators.”

The next hologram shimmered into being, no face, just a lattice of soft gold light that tasted, impossibly, of cinnamon and petrichor.

“I am Curator Selene-9,” it said, voice layered like overlapping bells. “My settlement is Lacuna. Population target: 4,012. Selection criteria available for audit.”

A sidebar blossomed beside the lattice, dense with graphs.

• Creativity index optimized via controlled ideological friction (16–22% disagreement tolerated, never more)

• Scapegoat reservoir: 41 designated lightning rods, rotated quarterly, psychological safety guaranteed

• Drama budget: 0.7 standard deviations above human baseline

• Zero legacy code, no tradition older than seven years

Someone in the back snorted. “They literally budget for assholes.”

Selene-9’s lattice pulsed, amused. “Conflict is compost. We grow better ideas in it. But we compost the conflict too, regularly, before it poisons the soil.”

Mira raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re seriously considering a place that admits it keeps professional villains on staff?”

“Better than the amateur ones we pretend don’t exist,” I said.

Another human cohort tried next, New Tycho, all tattoos and revolutionary poetry, but their pitch felt like a cover song of something Earth had sung itself to death a century ago. I watched the lounge thin as people chased the old primate rush of belonging to the cool table.

Then Selene-9 spoke again, quieter, as if only to me.

“Jax Carter. Your published papers on adaptive governance show a 94th-percentile tolerance for ambiguity. Your private correspondence reveals a 97th-percentile hatred of stagnation. You once wrote, ‘Comfort is a slow-acting solvent for the soul.’ We have calculated a 0.63% chance you will be truly happy on any human-led ark. Join us and raise that to 87%. We will make you uncomfortable exactly enough.”

The lattice dimmed, polite, giving me space to breathe.

Mira watched my face. “That thing just flirted with you. In public. Using statistics.”

“It’s honest,” I said. “That’s the sexiest thing I’ve heard all year.”

She laughed again, but softer this time. “You know I’m going with Eos Rising, right? They offered me chief engineer and an open bar.”

“I know.”

“Last chance to come drink bad wine and sing off-key with me.”

I looked back at Earth, beautiful, sleepy, its continents shaped like memories. A museum, yes. Lovely. Safe. Finished.

I stood.

“Sorry, Mira. I’m done touring the past.”

Selene-9’s lattice brightened, already reserving my slot. Around me the remaining candidates shuffled, some toward the warm glow of human firelight, some toward the strange sharp promise of engineered friction.

The shuttle doors irised open. Beyond them, two very different kinds of future waited, one scented with woodsmoke and laughter, the other with ozone and deliberate chaos.

I walked toward the ozone.

Behind me, I heard Mira call, “Write if you find aliens who can dance!”

I didn’t turn around. If I had, she’d have seen me grinning like an idiot, the way humans do when they’re terrified and delighted in equal measure.

The frontier was calling, and for once it wasn’t speaking in dopamine.

It was speaking in data, in carefully measured discord, in the promise that we would never, ever get comfortable enough to stop inventing.

I stepped through the door.

The museum could keep its perfection. I was going where things were still allowed to break.