Horizon Worldskipper, Sector Seven, sending a log to Horizon HQ. Landmass 5414-S7 is in visual range. Running preliminary scans. Horizon 2300 hours, local time unknown. Sending mission confirmation and noting the package in transit. Transmission end.
She waited impatiently, sparing a quick glance to the strange titanium box currently sitting in the cargo hold of her treader. Usually, she didn't ask questions, because the packages she occasionally carried were either extremely mundane or someone had paid top dollar for some interplanetary discretion. This, however, seemed to be neither. She was bringing this box with her to a (presumably) uninhabited landmass, with no buyer in sight and no information from the higher-ups. It had been with her for several weeks, through a handful of missions, which was even more unusual. Even Asha hadn't told her anything about it, and Asha was always a sure bet to spill.
The automated transmission from the nearest HQ interceptor was fluid, even with the crappy static that followed her radio's audio like a shadow. Ever since it'd broken on Landmass 1862-S7, she'd been using a salvaged retro hunk of plastic from a random market world. She couldn't afford anything too fancy, but it worked. It was jury-rigged to her sound system in a way that would probably give a Horizon inspector an aneurysm, if they ever bothered to check the treaders.
Horizon HQ to Worldskipper Seven. Log received at Horizon 2315, local time 7:15. Mission confirmed on Landmass 5414-S7. Package confirmed in transit. Horizon HQ over and out.
Yeah, alright. Shame on her for hoping the non-sentient autoresponse would tell her anything about the box. Seven sighed and spun in her pilot's chair. Autopilot could handle the logistics of maintaining orbit. It was late, at least, in her head (she wasn't sure what time it was here, and she wouldn't know until she landed and studied the rotational cycle), and she didn't want to work right now.
Of course, she was always here to work. But still. Wanted to think about something else, at least.
Seven meandered to the back of the treader--the Horizon Sunbeam, they called it, capable of lightspeed travel to the farthest reaches of the known universe (and the unknown, if their PR people were to be believed, which Seven didn't, but whatever). She dug around in the mess splayed across her countertop, searching for any of the coffee pods she kept stashed. Asha hooked her up even through that idiotic company phase where Horizon decided their workers didn't need to eat anything outside the corporate meals. When people threw a fit, Horizon reeled it back. 'Course, the people who complained the loudest lost their jobs, but Horizon couldn't fire everyone in the force. That was why Seven had just smuggled a supply in. Complaining got you nothing but destitution. You grinned and bore it.
She fished a pod out from under a crumpled stack of napkins. Probably left over from her last layover on Bravo.
Seven popped the pod into her coffee machine. It gurgled ominously. She smacked it with her palm. Didn't help that the thing was decades old, maybe older than her, but it made bearable coffee with some level of consistency, so she held onto it.
Her console beeped. She left the coffee brewing and slipped back to the controls. Even after all this time, all the bullshit Horizon liked to pull, Seven still felt a rush of curiosity every time her prelim readings came back. She couldn't help it. It was why she was here in the first place. That, and the crippling poverty.
"Okay, sure," Seven muttered to herself, "what'cha got for me today, Landmass... uh, five-four?"
She'd give it a better name if it turned out interesting. If not, eh, 5414-S7 was a great name for what was most likely going into the ledger as a dud. Maybe there'd be a lithium deposit, and it'd be renamed to LIT-643, or some such nonsense, but vastly more probably, it wouldn't be anything of note. Just a rock floating through space, too barren to host anything, without the resources to make it a Horizon asset.
The readings weren't promising. Nitrous atmosphere, though it had terrain. Mostly icy, but that meant there was water. Might be life. Not good for her paycheck. Very good for her curiosity.
High-grav. She already needed to wear a suit (and often did so even on planets that were entirely habitable, just to be safe), but high-grav... that was gonna be annoying. It always made her joints ache for weeks after. The exo would help with the strain, at least, keep her functioning. Naturally, the temp was plummeting. That would be the worst part by far. Breathability could be circumvented with oxygen tanks and ship camping, but the chill would mean any lifeform she encountered would likely try and force an interaction with her due to her body heat. To decrease that chance, she would have to chill her suit to the barest breaking point of sapien comfort zones. She hated doing that. The cold wasn't her friend. Back when she was still small, she used to enjoy the winter, layering blankets and scarves and mittens, but deprived of the usual creature comforts and community winter provided in an environment with temperate seasons, she found it much less enjoyable.
Also, coupled with the high-grav, it'd make her joint pain worse. So that was nice. Still, nothing she couldn't handle.
Her coffee maker screeched obnoxiously. Seven tore her eyes away from the console and busied herself with making coffee for the next few minutes. No creamer--perishables were a dead-set no-go for any worldskipper, for obvious reasons--but the warmth and bitterness of a black coffee was always welcome. Especially now that she knew she was headed for a fridge.
The treader beeped, trilling a three-note chime that told her it was about to enter orbit. Seven plopped down in the pilot's chair, clutching her coffee in one hand and fastening restraints with the other. The console waited for her to strap in before jolting the retros, boosting the treader into Landmass 5414-S7's gravitational pull.
Seven sipped her coffee as the ship jerked to the left, rolling and recalculating trajectories. It wasn't a perfect technology. Company policy forbade worldskippers from drinking while entering orbit, and technically, they were supposed to do it manually, but Seven had been at this for years. Usually she got through the auto-orbit without spilling a drop.
The mug warmed her palms. She closed her eyes, humming to herself. The interior of the treader was barren, mostly corporate white. It was on loan, of course, everything was. This incentivized the worldskippers to clean them spotlessly and discouraged any personalization or decoration, for safety purposes. Everyone watched that training video where some poor sap got choked by his fairy lights in zero-grav, and the one where someone's little hula-hooping bobblehead pierced their windshield upon atmosphere entry. No decorations on Seven's treader, unless you counted coffee stains and dirty socks thrown around the living quarters.
The treader went over a particularly rough bump. Maybe something in the upper atmosphere. Her teeth clinked against the rim of the ceramic mug as she took a sip, still humming.
There was another bump. The rim smashed into her teeth. She inhaled sharply, recoiling.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Seven threw the cup, undoing her seat restraints. Coffee sprayed the controls, alarms cheerfully beeping, telling her that an unidentified object had taken out the left engine.
Anything could happen on these missions. She was lucky, she knew that--or at least, she had been lucky until tonight.
She stumbled her way towards the back of the treader. The ship shook again. Shit, shit--hadn't it engaged the entry protocol? She couldn't do it manually, not if she wanted to survive the rapidly-increasing possibility of the windshield breaking like an egg. Seven snatched at the straps of her exosuit, desperately tugging it on as the ship lost altitude. Her mug lay in scattered pieces on the floor.
Finally, the entry shields kicked in. Seven stuffed her head into her helmet, tripping over her own feet. She skidded to the front of the treader, which wasn't hard because it was currently tilting forward at a 45 degree angle. Grabbing the controls, she attempted to wrestle the vessel back into some semblance of a passable trajectory, but it was too late. All she could do was brace for impact as the unforgiving, beautiful scenes of blue ice filled her vision.
Once, Dahlia had wanted to be a scientist. Many children her age wanted to be scientists, to help humanity charge forward on this bold new path. She grew up during the boom in tech companies with shiny new entrepreneurs promising to pave the road to the stars, promising that the future wasn't on this dull, choked, suffering planet, but somewhere with endless potential, if only they could find it.
(They never found a planet that could support human life. Sometimes, Horizon remembered that it was still, technically, promising people this, and occasionally, it would tell its worldskippers to search for those criteria, but the directive was always hastily dropped once the outrage of the week faded and Horizon could move on to more important things, like mining lithium and silicon and silver from uninhabited landmasses.)
Dahlia was different, she swore she was. She studied, by the light of streetlamps outside the home she shared with her grandmother, books she'd fished out of the deepest, darkest sections of the library. For her tenth birthday, her grandmother bought her complex star charts, the kind adults used in planetariums. They were already out of date by the next year, with how fast the companies were naming new systems, but she didn't care. She updated them herself, penciling in the new additions to the best of her ability with data she pieced together in the school computer lab, when she was supposed to be a language assignment.
The streetlights outside her grandma's apartment were very bright, their light dispersing across the sky like a fog. Dahlia couldn't see the stars from there, a fact which vexed her greatly. One night, when she was 15 and the star chart in her room looked more like a moth-eaten carpet from the force of all the modifications and erasures she'd made, Dahlia had done one very out of character thing.
She loved her grandmother. She did. Dahlia would have dinner with her every night. She didn't know who her parents were, just that they didn't want her, and that her grandmother had trouble talking about them. But she didn't care. It was good. She had a good life.
That night, she told her grandmother that she felt ill. She went to her room early, around 8:30, and pretended to sleep. In reality, she slipped out through the window at 9, after gathering her equipment--her makeshift telescope, consisting of a pair of bird-watching binoculars, her battered star chart, her compass, and a journal--with a twinge of guilt. Her grandmother told her not to go out after dark, and not to wander away from the apartment, but she had to get out tonight. It could be the only chance she would ever get to see Halley's comet.
She slid down the fire escape, wiggling through until her feet touched concrete. Dahlia landed gracelessly, almost losing her balance, but managed to catch herself, placing a steadying hand on the wall. She stood, took a deep breath, and took off down the narrow street.
It was harder to escape the city than she thought. It seemed to sprawl on forever, the streets dead ending or leading into a completely different maze. Eventually, she stumbled away from the lights, and she only had to hop one chain-link fence to do it. Again, she landed gracelessly, and this time, she couldn't catch herself. Dahlia toppled from the top of the fence, her backpack cushioning her fall.
There was a sickening crunch. Dahlia's heart sank. She scrambled to open her backpack, to check inside, but there was nothing she could do to fix the massive crack in the lens of her binoculars. One of the lenses was basically unusable.
All that, only to fail the second she stepped outside city limits. Dahlia clenched her jaw and shoved the binoculars back into her pack. Halley's comet would still be visible with the naked eye, she just... wouldn't be able to see the Pleiades. And that was fine.
Still, she could see the lights, blotting out some of the stars. Without her binoculars, she had to get even farther from the city. Which was fine. She could do that.
Dahlia kept going.
She found a cliff, looking over a valley. It was barren, all the natural grasses stripped away in favor of the same grey dirt. Probably an overgrazing situation; she'd read about them in school. That was part of why she liked the sky so much. It was a fresh start, somewhere people like her wouldn't have to pay for their elders' failures.
She loved her grandmother, but sometimes, it was hard. Sometimes, when she looked at her grandmother, she only wanted to ask, how did we get here? Why didn't you stop this?
They had once lived inland, but even then, the tide was creeping toward them. They lived in a complex that had been rebuilt four times and survived four more hurricanes. Sometimes it felt like Dahlia was living out an apocalypse, one they didn't even bother calling school off for.
But here, she could see the stars. The visibility wasn't as perfect as it could have been, but she had at least one working binocular lens, and she didn't want to go too far from the city. Dahlia couldn't leave her grandmother that alone, even for a little while.
Dahlia sat in the grass and waited, rolling her binoculars in her hands.
Seven surveyed the smoking wreck of the treader. She tried her best not to give in to despair, but, shit, this was going to cost her. The treader was on loan. The second the company insurance lost track of a malfunctioning unit, a maintenance cost was getting added to her account. Horizon would pay for half, if the claim worked out, which it almost never did.
She tried to tell herself it could be worse.
She stared through the cracked, useless windshield, and tried to tell herself that at least the radio hadn't broken, so she could contact HQ and tell them exactly how badly she'd screwed up. Of course, it would take a while to reach them, being relayed through sporadically placed signal stations, and it would take even longer for them to respond as the signal worked its way across those stations again, and still longer for them to dispatch any kind of rescue crew to clean the mess up. All told, it'd take a while before anyone would come for her. A risk of the job.
Seven sighed and stepped through the wreckage. She snatched up a meal packet and shook it, squeezing it between her fingers before realizing she couldn't eat it through her helmet. Stupid anoxic atmosphere. At least it wasn't extremely flammable.
She sighed again and put the meal packet down. Problem-solving with food would come later. She wasn't even all that hungry, anyway, she just needed something to do while she stewed over the accident. Her eyes wandered, looking for something to take her anger out on, and snagged on the titanium crate sitting innocently in the back of the treader.
Seven frowned, glowered, even, at the thing. "What're you lookin' at?"
The box, predictably, did not respond.
"This was probably your fault," Seven said. She felt like a petulant child, but dammit, everything was going wrong, and she was starting to feel the cold in her bones, and she couldn't even see the stars anymore. "I know it was. Undisclosed goddamn package, they probably found out about the coffee thing and wanted to humiliate me."
Seven approached the box, her arms crossed, lips pursed disapprovingly. She surveyed it, taking in the shining silvery titanium finish, the blue Horizon logo spraypainted on the side, the keypad where the client would access its contents. At least the crash had marred the previously flawless surface. This gave her some petty satisfaction.
Until she realized there was a giant hole at the bottom of the crate.
Seven couldn't even find the capacity to be angry about it. It just felt natural that this would happen, now of all times. Murphy's Law. Her first crash would be on a freezing high-grav planet and would be immediately followed by her first cargo loss. Why not?
She stuffed her head inside the crate, trying to see if the cargo had been lost. It seemed empty. She sighed.
You seem distressed, a flat, smooth voice said from behind her. Is there something I can help you with?
Seven whipped around and socked the robot in the mouth before she'd even processed what it was saying.
Ow, the robot said cheerfully, spreadeagle on the ground.
Dahlia sat in the office, LED lights flickering above her head, and stared at the desk. The papers sat with her, unmoving.
"I know it's a big decision," the lady behind the desk said sympathetically. She was wearing massive red glasses. Dahlia thought they were a little funny. They reminded her a bit of her grandmother.
"Can... can I take these home? To read them?" Dahlia asked. Her voice wouldn't crack. She was fine.
"Of course, honey," desk lady said. Dahlia probably would have thought she was being condescending if it weren't for those glasses. "Take care of yourself. I know it's hard."
Dahlia wanted to punch something, at that. Did she? Did she know it was hard? Losing the only person who meant anything to her? Watching her die in a hospital, trying desperately to fix it, gambling with her own life, only to lose her anyway? Saddled with medical debt so astronomical it would literally take her to the stars?
But desk lady's glasses reminded her of her grandmother. Just a bit.
Dahlia forced a smile. "Thanks."
She read over the contract that night. Not that she had the luxury of thinking it over (she didn't even really have the luxury of reading it over, but she'd promised herself she'd at least know what she was getting into, even if that was back when she thought she'd be a scientist). Later, she'd find out that not a single one of her coworkers had read it. Maybe that was why some of them were deluded enough to think they could change anything.
She'd be in charge of Sector Seven. Horizon didn't pay, but they'd let her work off her debt, give her food, loan her a treader, and get her off this damn rock that had killed the only person she loved. It was her only option. It would be good enough.
Dahlia reported to the Horizon office first thing next morning, got the papers notorized, and never saw Earth again.
Seven stared at the robot. It did not stare back, its eyes trained on the sky as it flailed, rearranging its steel-looking limbs so it could stand back up. The thing was clearly modeled after a human--terrifyingly so, for the unnatural range of motion it displayed. save for the lack of clothes or hair. On its chest, the familiar Horizon logo was engraved, separating its torso into segments.
I am Horizon Project Dawn prototype 4181291. You may call me Dahlia. I am a Worldskipper!
Seven's jaw dropped beneath her helmet. She took a full step back, revulsion rising in her throat.
"No, you're fucking not," Seven said, "I am."
The robot sprung back up, balancing on its shiny feet, and flashed a serene, perfectly whitened smile at her. Dahlia is a beautiful name. It must be popular! I am a Worldskipper!
Seven stared her replacement in the face and realized, with full certainty, that if she told Horizon she was out here, they would come, not for her, but for this robot. They would assume, probably rightly, that it had learned enough from her voyages with it on board to replace her. The accident was a great cover for just leaving her out here to die.
She was on her own, with a stupid robot they'd modeled to steal her life.
Seven clenched her fists, turned away from the robot, and stalked toward her ship. She would just do this herself, then.
This is a little sci-fi short story I wrote for a class final in 2025. It was my first time writing fiction for a class, and, I think, my first time writing science fiction in any form. I've read a ton of the stuff, but never written it. My annoyance with generative AI turned into the blueprint for a story about worker's rights, space corporatization, and class disparity. I'm fascinated by the differences between fictionalized sci-fi robots and real-world AI programs, so I wanted to make something that explored that difference. It's a piece I often think about. I have a continuation planned out; I always thought the concept could be stretched into a novel, sort of like Martha Wells' series The Murderbot Diaries (though I came up with the concept before reading those books). It's still one of my favorite things I've written--I really enjoy the idea and I love writing Seven!