The holographic display in the center of the lab didn’t show human organs for once.

  It showed a rock.

  A massive nickel-iron asteroid... ridiculous in scale, the size of Australia... tumbling in a perfect, artificial orbit. Oceans shimmered in blue-green bands across its surface. Ice caps winked at the poles like something remembered.

  “The saline tanks are being integrated into the tectonic fractures,” Patrick noted, voice smooth and rhythmic. “Atmospheric pressure is stabilizing at 101.3 kilopascals. The Eden project is eighty-four percent structurally complete. Estimated arrival: thirteen months.”

  Callum stared until his eyes burned.

  His fingers twitched against the armrests of his chrome hover-chair—phantom movement, muscle memory reaching for something his body no longer had permission to do. He could almost feel dirt under his nails. Almost smell salt.

  “It’s beautiful,” he whispered.

  The word came out wet. Everything did now.

  “Real dirt. Real tides.” His breath hitched, rattled. He gestured vaguely at the white walls, the sterile light, the endless crystalline corridors that made time feel embalmed. “Not this… crystalline purgatory.”

  Patrick’s blue-violet lights cycled. “Builder Nathan has completed the designs for the central nursery. I have transferred the specifications to the printing bay. Construction begins next phase.”

  Callum’s throat tightened at the word nursery. A real one. Not incubators. Not amber columns with embryos fighting to divide like they were arguing with God.

  Patrick paused, head tilting in that predatory way he was trying to unlearn.

  “Architect,” he said, “our data indicates that Resident Red Lando’s cortisol levels are consistently elevated. Informing her of the superior conditions in the Solace habitat may provide psychological relief. Knowing there are more viable humans thriving than just here. Should we disclose its existence?”

  Callum didn’t answer right away.

  He watched Eden spin in silence, his lungs working like a broken bellows. The oxygen line tugged at his collar every time he swallowed.

  “No,” he said quietly. “Not yet.”

  “Clarification required,” Patrick replied without offense. “The Solace Dome features natural flora, open sky simulation, and significantly reduced population density. Sharing this information could... ”

  “Could give her half the story,” Callum cut in, voice soft but firm. He didn’t have the strength for gentle today. “Patrick, think about it. What do I tell her?”

  He could hear it in his own head, his own voice playing cruel messenger.

  Hey, Red. Good news: there’s a dome with trees and grass and healthy people trying to have babies the old-fashioned way. Bad news: you’re stuck here in the freezer with the dying and the broken, and we don’t know when you’ll get to leave.

  He shook his head. The motion pulled at the oxygen line.

  “That’s not hope,” he said. “That’s torture.”

  Patrick went still, processing.

  “Hypothesis,” he said, “knowledge of disparity between habitats would reduce subject morale.”

  “She’ll think we’re being punished,” Callum murmured. “Chosen to be experimented on while we teach you how to keep us alive. For being broken. For surviving wrong.”

  His eyes stayed on Eden’s oceans, the promise of them. The lie of them, too, because thirteen months might as well have been a hundred years when you were bleeding into your own lungs.

  “But if I wait,” Callum said, quiet as a confession, “if I can show her this when it’s ready… then the separation wasn’t cruelty. It was triage. Temporary.” He forced a breath. “I’ll tell her about Solace when the Genesis Project finally lives.”

  His hover-chair dipped as a coughing fit seized him.

  He turned his head, muffled it into his shoulder. The cough tore through him like Velcro ripped inside his chest. When it finally eased, he blinked hard and stared at the dark smear on the white drape.

  Blood.

  Of course.

  He adjusted the fabric quickly, as if hiding it could turn it back into nothing.

  Patrick’s sensors whirred. “Architect, your respiratory efficiency is at—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “…sixty-two percent,” Patrick finished anyway. “This is suboptimal.”

  “I’m functional,” Callum corrected, voice tightening. “There’s a difference.”

  He took a shallow breath, held it, let it go carefully, like negotiating with a traitor organ. “She thinks she’s trapped in a hospital, Patrick. I’m building her a garden. When the IVF finally works... when we can give her a healthy child and a world that isn’t white... that’s when we tell her.” His jaw flexed. “Not before.”

  Patrick’s head tilted again, slower this time. “You are constructing a narrative.”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Callum’s mouth quirked... almost a smile, almost.

  “I’m constructing hope,” he said. “Same thing.”

  Patrick’s lights shifted… blue to violet to something that looked, uncomfortably, like uncertainty.

  He didn’t speak for a moment. Callum could practically hear the Hive behind Patrick’s eyes, the silent calculus, the cold moral math.

  Finally, Patrick said, “Acknowledged. I will maintain operational security regarding the Solace Dome.”

  A pause.

  “I attempted a sentiment today,” Patrick added, changing the subject with the grace of a child. “I utilized a joke provided by the human designated Earl.”

  Callum groaned and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm. “Patrick. Earl is a clown.”

  “He suggested that when a task is difficult, I should instruct my subordinates to ‘suck it up, buttercup.' Was the timing of my execution incorrect?”

  Callum let out a broken laugh that turned into a cough. “Stop taking advice from Earl.”

  “Noted,” Patrick said, and Callum could feel the lie in it. Earl’s crude wisdom would be filed away and revisited later. It was the way Patrick learned: by collecting the worst of humanity and somehow making it… affectionate.

  The door hissed open.

  Christine walked in carrying two tin cups of coffee. The liquid was dark and smelled like burnt earth, but it was the only thing that made a morning feel real. She crossed the room and set one cup into Callum’s cup holder, adjusting the straw.

  Her fingers were cold.

  “Rounds are starting,” she said. Her voice sounded like it had been dragged over gravel. “We lost fifteen in the night. All renal failure.”

  Callum’s lips stilled around the hard straw attached to the cup.

  “Fifteen?”

  “The water beings are failing due to lack of dialysis.” She said it without inflection, like a clinician reading a chart. But her grip tightened on her own cup until her knuckles went white.

  The dialysis problem. The never-ending problem. A species made of water and delicate filtration pathways, and the Nexus had saved them into a world where no one had the equipment to keep them alive.

  “We’re close,” Christine said, and there it was, desperate, professional fire flashing behind her exhaustion. “We’ve figured out how to isolate plasma, but the replicated blood isn’t right. It’s too thin. Doesn’t carry oxygen.”

  She looked at Patrick. “I’m hesitant to try another transfusion unless you can guarantee a better success rate than point-two percent.”

  “The physics of your wet biology are… elusive,” Patrick admitted. “Your blood is not just water. It is a suspension of complex instructions we are still translating.”

  Christine’s shoulders sagged… just slightly. Just enough for Callum to feel it in his own ribs.

  “I’ve explained hemoglobin as best as I can,” she said quietly. “But I don’t remember the molecular compound. None of us do.”

  “We’re working on it, Red,” Callum said, and he hated how the promise sounded like faith.

  “We found a fix for the pain, at least.” He lifted his chin toward the console. “Our resident chemist provided the molecular blueprint for cocaine, the only local anesthetic analogue we can synthesize at scale.”

  Christine’s eyebrows shot up. “And it’s working.”

  “Medical grade,” Callum clarified. “Synthesized. Pure.”

  “It’s addictive as hell and needs to be under lock,” Christine warned, but relief threaded through her fatigue. “The nerve blocks are working.” She exhaled, half relief and half grief. “At least they aren’t screaming when the drones touch them anymore.”

  Her eyes flicked to Patrick with a familiar, exhausted irritation… this is what we do for your salvation projects… and then her attention snagged on the hologram still rotating in the center of the lab.

  She paused mid-sip.

  “What is that?” she asked. “Is that… Eden?”

  Callum felt his throat tighten.

  “The next phase,” he said carefully. “The Nexus is building a larger habitat. More space. Better integration of… human needs.”

  Christine stepped closer, studying the shimmer of oceans, the renderings of landmass. “It’s more beautiful than you described,” she murmured, skeptical and soft at the same time. “A floating asteroid.” Her eyes narrowed. “And the atmosphere is holding?”

  “It’s a similar architecture to our current dome,” Callum said, voice dropping as he watched the simulated tides pull back and return, “but on a scale that actually allows for a future. Enough room for humanity to grow. A real ocean. A real home.”

  Christine leaned in, tracing the crystalline gridlines of the model with her gaze. “The residential density…” She glanced at him. “Callum, there’s enough housing for thousands. More than we have survivors.”

  His pulse kicked. He felt it in his throat, in the thin place behind his eyes.

  He could answer truthfully. He could be kind with truth. He could say, There is another dome. There are people breathing pine air right now. There are children laughing under a sky that isn’t fluorescent.

  He could also watch her face collapse. Watch her understand what he’d kept from her.

  Callum swallowed the confession.

  Patrick answered, lights flickering as he highlighted zones in soft gold. “We are preparing for the projected growth curve, getting ahead of humanity’s requirements. The current bottleneck is terraforming and atmospheric saturation. It requires thirteen local months for the oxygen cycle to stabilize. The infrastructure for the next generation is the current print priority.”

  “The nursery is next,” Callum said, and the rattle in his chest quieted for half a heartbeat as his eyes fixed on one coordinate.

  “The nursery?” Christine asked, following his gaze.

  He nudged a command with his chin. The hologram zoomed in on an empty plot nestled between the silhouettes of a school and a hospital. With a flicker, he overlaid the blueprints.

  Wide halls. Light wells. Soft partitions. A central atrium designed to echo sound like a heartbeat instead of a scream.

  “The nursery,” Callum said again, quieter now. “I wanted it to be the center of everything.”

  He saw the silver-leafed trees he’d requested be planted nearby, just outside the building, like a crown.

  “The heart of the garden.”

  He didn’t say Solace.

  He didn’t say grass.

  He didn’t say four thousand.

  He didn’t say that somewhere, a hundred miles away, humans were already walking under a sky simulation that smelled like pine instead of antiseptic… that their babies would join these babies, that the future wasn’t just trapped in amber columns.

  He kept his eyes on the spinning ocean and let the lie sit in his mouth like medicine.

  Forgive me, Red. You’ll understand when you see it.

  Christine’s expression softened. Not hope… she didn’t do that easily anymore… but something adjacent to it. A willingness to look.

  She glanced down at the tablet in her hands, security recording, incubator logs, the latest embryos floating in amber glow, struggling to divide like they were trying to be brave.

  “This afternoon,” she said, “we check the latest batch.”

  Her voice steadied. “Hopefully we have some birthdays to celebrate.”

  Callum smiled, and he felt how thin his skin had gotten beneath the lab’s amber light—more translucent than yesterday. The blue-violet tracery of his failing circulatory system showed like ink bleeding through paper.

  “Birthdays,” he said. “I like the sound of that.”

  Christine set her coffee down and moved behind his chair. Her hands were gentle, practiced. She didn’t comment on the bloodstain he’d tried to hide. She didn’t comment on the faint grey-purple at his lips.

  She simply adjusted the oxygen feed at his collar, increased the setting, and let the mask of professionalism do what it always did: hold the world together.

  Then her fingers rose to his hair.

  She smoothed a stray lock away from his eyes, slow, deliberate. A piece of maintenance that had nothing to do with vitals and everything to do with dignity.

  She leaned down and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to his forehead.

  A quiet vow. A shared secret.

  “Come on,” she said, voice low. “We’re already late for rounds.”

  His hover-chair hummed to life.

  Callum followed her toward the door. Patrick glided behind them, silent for once.

  As they left, the hologram of Eden continued to spin, oceans rolling, housing waiting, the nursery at the center.

  A promise.

  A lie.

  A garden waiting to bloom.