REBEL PLANET

Hypnos Colony, New Eden Moon

Jayde Ashr had never been this far from solid ground, never felt the world shrink beneath her, the unknown stretching wide above.

Hand over hand, she told herself. Just keep going.

“Almost there!” Merrick called out.

Her friend Merrick Sloan, just a few rungs below, laughed as Jayde clung to the ladder, her knuckles white with tension.

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” Jayde called down.

“Just keep going,” Merrick shouted back. “Trust me. It’ll be worth it.”

Jayde took a deep breath and forced herself to move, step by step, resisting the urge to look down. As she continued her ascent, hot sweat collected inside her white Academy uniform.

The two friends were scaling the communications tower in Hypnos, their isolated colony on the New Eden moon, the farthest human settlement from Earth. For them, it was more than just home. It was their entire world. Born and raised here, neither of them had ever left its domed confines.

The communication tower loomed far above every other structure in the colony, its spire reaching high enough to nearly pierce the thick plastic glass that ensured their survival on a moon devoid of atmosphere. Just before she reached the top, Jayde made the mistake of glancing down. Her stomach lurched and a chirp of fear escaped her lips.

If she slipped, she figured she’d have about thirty seconds to reflect on her first-ever act of rebellion before hitting the ground. She imagined her mother’s reaction to the news: disbelief and shock that her “perfect daughter,” the one who had spent her life fading into the background, obeying every rule and upholding the edicts of the Construct, had splattered like a pancake after an ill-advised climb.

If her father was still alive, he would fixate on the timing. Jayde’s death would overshadow her last day at the Academy, the day she was supposed to receive her career assignment and begin her contributions to the Noble Purpose. He would wonder why she had chosen this day, of all days, to lose her mind.

Jayde’s thoughts stilled for a moment as her fingers found the top of the tower. She crawled onto the platform, breathing hard, and quickly scrambled away from the edge. Pressing her back against a buzzing network box, she glanced upward at the massive satellite dish slowly rotating above her. As host to a vast computing infrastructure, Hypnos was the home base for the Construct, and the communication tower linked it to the rest of humanity’s scattered colonies.

The Construct was many things. An artificial intelligence. A guide. A savior. Centuries ago, when Earth teetered on the brink of extinction, the Construct was humanity’s last hope. It solved the unsolvable—war, climate collapse, disease—and laid out a vision to unify the fractured species. This vision became the Great Expansion, a plan to spread humanity across the stars, and at its core was the Noble Purpose, a doctrine that demanded the survival of the whole take precedence over the desires of the individual.

The Self for the All.

Through it, every choice, every action, every life was shaped.

Including Jayde’s.

Today, the Construct would decide her role in society, as it had for generations before her. It would determine how she would serve the colony. But Jayde didn’t need to wait for its proclamation. She already knew what her assignment would be: programming Artificial Intelligence. Genetics played a heavy role in the Construct’s decisions, and her father’s legacy as an esteemed engineer and clergyman, combined with her own success in her Academy AI classes, made the outcome inevitable.

But inevitability didn’t make it right.

Her daydreams provided only clues to her true desires. Sometimes Jayde imagined stealing a space suit and climbing the jagged mountains of the New Eden moon, feeling the vastness of existence stretch around her. But she never acted on those thoughts. They simply didn’t matter.

What mattered was what was best for the colony. What mattered was the Noble Purpose.

Merrick’s head appeared over the edge of the platform, his climb complete, and he let out an exuberant whoop that echoed in the still air.

“Quiet!” Jayde hissed. “You’re going to get us caught!”

She crawled over and extended a hand, helping him onto the small, precarious perch. Once seated, Merrick flopped back with a wide grin, completely unfazed by the extreme height. His white uniform now had lines of rust and grease all over it, a gift from the filthy ladder they had just climbed. Even the gold seams that edged the lines of his pants and shirt were tarnished. Jayde looked at her own uniform and was relieved that her clothes were not as soiled.

She brushed her brown hair behind her ears and lowered her hazel eyes at the colony below. From this vantage point, all of Hypnos stretched before her, its stark white buildings laid out in rigid, orderly blocks. It was early morning and the colony was just stirring, most of its inhabitants waking to begin their daily obligations.

New Eden, the emerald planet of toxic gas that hosted their moon, had yet to rise and appear through the hexagonal-paned glass above. Jayde waited for it, her eyes fixed on the stars. Next to her, Merrick was smiling, truly smiling, the first time she’d seen him happy in weeks. It was that sly, lopsided grin that endeared him to her, though ironically, it had been the very thing her father disapproved of most; Dr. Richard Ashr had made no secret of his disdain for Merrick Sloan.

“The boy doesn’t live by the creed,” he would say.

It was Jayde’s mother who had always encouraged their friendship. She never explained why, but Jayde had some theories. Maybe it was because Merrick had no one else. His mother, father, and brother had all perished together in a mining accident years ago, leaving him adrift in the colony. Or maybe her mother had seen something in him, a spark of potential invisible to others, even the all-seeing Construct.

Merrick wasn’t holding out much hope for Career Assignment Day. He knew his fate was in the asteroid mines. That’s where the Construct would send someone like him. A rule-breaking, under-performing Academy student? It was practically a foregone conclusion.

Jayde felt for him. The mines weren’t just backbreaking; they crushed the spirit, grinding down anyone unlucky enough to be sent there.

“Not much of a view from up here, really,” Merrick said. “Just rows of white cubes.”

“Then why even climb up here?” Jayde asked.

“It’s not the view. It’s the feeling.”

“Right now, I feel guilty. For skipping our Career Assignment.”

“Forget about that,” Merrick continued. “They won’t miss us. Just look how small it all is down there. The buildings. The people. We’re never going to get this far away from Hypnos again.”

Jayde thought about it and, despite their precarious perch, she couldn’t deny the thrill of being above it all. They lingered there in silence, the world around them distilled into the rhythmic creak of the satellite rotating overhead. Above, the gargantuan planet of New Eden appeared, starting its slow crawl over the horizon.

For a fleeting moment, Jayde forgot the path her life was destined to follow. All that mattered was the freedom of the moment, and the vast chasm separating them from the structured reality below.