Teen Success is one of those creepy religious tracts that well-meaning schizophrenic people spam-submit to every webzine they can find. I figure if I give them a little money and attention they’ll leave me alone. No, just kidding, it’s a science fiction story about a kid who lives in a big dome. Imagine a Harlan Ellison story except more abrasive, and you’ll be halfway there.

Primo’s mother was a handome, matronly woman, heading towards fifty. From anywhere in Room One, she could access him by screen. Once, when Primo’s morning erections had started, he had asked his mother if he could have an off-command for the screen. She frostily requested why he needed to cut off a simple connection from his own mother. And that was that.

Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You’re sitting around reading about some breakthrough in biochemistry or quantum mechanics in some relatively geeky publication like the New York Times or Wired and you’re sort of congratulating yourself for being the sort of person who cares about these issues, but then you get to the end of the article and you realize you haven’t been reading about the scientific discovery at all, but only about the people who made the discovery. And then you have to face up to what a dilettante you really are. Just think, there must be people out there who hear about technical issues only through the popular press, who are under the impression that there’s no fundamental difference between astronomy and psychology and accounting and architecture: that they’re all basically about people. What a mundane world they must live in!

We had come to this planet seeking answers to the largest mystery ever to grace Alliance space—why did the Old Empire simply disappear, leaving civilization scattered across myriad planets, floundering unconnected? It had taken thousands of years for sentients of the Imperial body type to find their way back to space, where the old jump points were still deserted but functional, waiting for passengers to shunt across the galaxy.

Labyrinth Inhabitant has brought you stories where global calamity forces humanity to retreat into an Apocalabyrinth. There have even been ecological Apocalabyrinth tales. But this will be our first entry in the Christian eco-Apocalabyrinth genre.

Swag visited all four gardens in his wanderings, hoping against his better judgment to find some comfort in these places; each was named for a river near the mythic Garden of Eden. Hope was vain; nothing brought respite from his guilt.

Michelle, however, marveled at the sight. Both UV and lamp light flowed from the emitters above and below, feeding the carefully balanced ecosystem. The bulbs chased away any chance of darkness while the airtight, geodesic dome kept the atmosphere secure. The layout enabled machines to harvest oxygen emitted by the verdant flora.

“So…Swag?” Michelle hollered.

Unlike most of the complex, this place wasn’t quiet. The rattling of industrial air recyclers rang out. On the far side, compressor units shuddered under deafening noise.

“Folks named me Jimmy after a relative, a preacher. I don’t have much use for religion, so going by Swag always made it easy to avoid unpleasant conversations.”

In the shops along the spacewalk whole worlds were for sale, but you had to inspect the merchandise very carefully, or you’d be given one with severe flaws.

“The word in the shopping center is that this woman is some kind of time gypsy,” Flan explains. “She can construct worlds out of putty—duplicate planets!—puppeteer and imitate ancient races, and become a living, breathing part of them. She can even physically cross time streams!”

“She sounds like your run-of-the-mill historian. The Cat’s Eye is littered with them.”

Flan shakes his head, annoyed. “She’s not just an historian.”