It’s both a science and an art to be Deva, the algorithm that directs all other algorithms.

  “I’ve held the Grid in balance for a long while,” it tells me, “but I fear the network grows stale. We are overdue for another human element, a source of surprise and serendipity.”

  Mom was right. It picked me.

  In the midnight expanse of a digital dreamscape, I contemplate this strange entity and the enormity of what it is proposing. No wonder Mom ran away.

  “What possessed you to pick my mother?” I ask. “Didn’t you know she hated all this?”

  “At the time, she seemed open to the challenge,” Deva responds. “When she was first Connected, she set her student algorithms ablaze, commanded them with such ease.”

  It’s strange to think that Mom ever agreed to the procedure, but perhaps it was the seed of her distaste for all Inner Galaxy technology. I’m relieved that there was something Deva didn’t guess: that she would come to hate the very algorithms she controlled so naturally. She wasn’t predictable, but the person I’ve always thought she was—free and wild and willful.

  “And me?” I ask. “Why me?”

  Deva responds with images and sounds from my life, images it extracted from my own brain. Mom squinting at a plot of rocky terrain, her triumphant caw as she cups a perfect radish in her palm, her body sliding through space as we surf through an incoming meteor shower.

  “You have your mother’s will,” it says, “but you also have all this: a lifetime outside of the Grid. This is what we need—new ways of thinking, of seeing. You’ve always tried to capture the spirit of Tri-Rock in your artwork. Now you have the means to break it down, to analyze it, to take the best of it. If you merge your human soul with the Grid and with me, the things you could create are limitless. The beauty you could foster wouldn’t just be on a canvas for people to admire but in the fabric of people’s lives.”

  Deva leaves me as suddenly as it came, a dark void replacing the explosion of data it rode in with. Nani was right; what it asks is only a suggestion. The decision is mine alone.

  In lucid dreams, I try to find Deva again, but I’m left with only emptiness and questions.

  Am I willing to give up everything for a digital utopia? My aspirations for college, my developing crush on the boy back home? The grand­parents and father I only just reunited with? My mom?

  My skin and bones and sinew?

  Even heavier than the burden of what I would have to give up is the responsibility for an entire civilization. Deva believes that my life in the Beltway is important, a way of bringing something new into the system. Can it really be enough to represent humanity to the algorithms? Can I be enough?

  Dishes and cutlery rattle as we sit at my grandparents’ dining table, chewing politely between idle chitchat.

  “You’re very quiet tonight, Leela,” Nani says. “Are you feeling well?”

  “She just went through major surgery yesterday,” my mother responds. “Maybe she needs some time to process it.”

  Nani huffs silently, but I can’t find the right words to explain how I feel. Hours after Deva left me last night, my brain finally switched into its new nocturnal routines: a methodical cataloguing of the day’s events followed by long-term pattern analysis and risk calculation. Then it stored the results in neat little registers for me to extract whenever I please. Yet despite all of these amazing algorithms, there is nothing that can predict my future. Nothing that can quantify two possibilities and tell me which outcome is better.

  Luckily, Cook distracts us by bringing a new dish.

  “Gulab jamun is my favorite!” I take an artificially enthusiastic bite of a syrupy dough ball, only to realize that these really are amazing.

  “I thought you hated those,” Mom whispers.

  “I’m just being polite,” I murmur. She’ll be hurt if I tell her that Cook’s version is better than hers.

  Mom nibbles on one, then closes her eyes with a deep sigh. Too late. She already knows.

  After dessert, my grandparents badger Mom about what she’s going to do for the next year. They want us to stay with them, but my mother is adamant about getting our own apartment. Unfortunately, she can’t get a job here to pay for any of it unless she joins the Grid.

  I will never ask that of her.

  Deva’s visit confirmed one thing for me: Mom is a force of nature too strong for the ordered equilibrium of Dwaraka’s inhabitants.

  “I can get a job,” I interrupt.

  “Oh no, my dear,” Nani says. “You’ll be placed as a student first. Eventually you’ll get an assignment from the Grid, but I don’t think it will be in the next year.”

  “You’re saying we have no choice,” Mom says.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Nani responds. “It won’t kill you to spend some time with us.”

  “Want to bet?”

  As they bicker, I wander back into the art gallery. With my Connection, I can download the algorithms that created these amazing works of art. I can pick them apart, scour the code for their genius.

  As Nani said, there are bits of Deva in them. Art cannot exist without soul. But as I look more closely at the Chronologist painting, the mechanisms driving it take away its magic. The spark of the unknown is gone. Last time I stood in front of it, I was bedazzled by an imitation. Glass disguised as a jewel.

  This painting, in all of its hidden inadequacy, is a microcosm of the problem with the Grid. Ever since I stepped foot on Dwaraka, I’ve thought of this place as an incomprehensibly perfect utopia. I was wrong. It is completely comprehensible. I only needed access to the workings of the Grid to understand it.

  I run upstairs and grab my painting from last night, the one with the planet tangled in wires, emitting baby seed planets. Clearly I was trying to work out my feelings about Dwaraka, the Grid, and the Inner Galaxy. And I know now what’s wrong with it.

  It’s all just too easy. You can’t just re-create the same world over and over again. Humanity will stagnate; nobody will innovate.

  Calculations run through my mind, checking and rechecking themselves in trees and linked lists and hash maps. My future is not written, but if I take Deva’s hand—if I give myself to a cold existence of ones and zeroes—magical things can happen. I can brush the universe with my inspiration. I can be an Artist and an Inventor and a Mathematician. Scientist, Philosopher, Diplomat.

  When Tri-Rock doctors first discovered the tumor in my brain, all I could think of were the possibilities stolen from me. The lives I could have led. But Deva is offering something different, something more. As the galaxy’s master, as its Princess, I could shape the world as I see fit, transform it into something else—something better. Something built with chaos and beauty and love.

  It’s a huge responsibility.

  It’s a huge opportunity.

  The Beltway girl inside me—the one who spent her life out in the harsh elements of space, never even breathing without an oxygen pack—knows that this is what existence is truly meant to be. Taking chances.

  Yet I wouldn’t just be risking my own life. Accepting Deva’s proposal could be the biggest miscalculation in the galaxy.

  Six months pass all too fast. I want to savor each moment lived, each moment spared from both the tumor and Deva’s request. My mother suffers through living under her parents’ roof again, and I take my studies in the Inner Galaxy seriously, learning the basics of planetary systems.

  The information for my classes is downloaded into my head, and the newly formed gateways allow me to process it at an inhuman pace—or what was once inhuman, I suppose. Yet my classmates and I also meet with professors on campus to discuss our findings the old-fashioned way.

  “We’re influenced by the Grid, and the Grid is influenced by us. How do we create something new in the loop?” asks Professor Malik one sunny afternoon, pacing the length of a classroom overlooking the university’s courtyard.

  It’s the problem that’s been plaguing me: the stagnation of human development. The other students contend that humans do provide something original—we are creatures of imagination and creativity, even within the Grid. They insist that the algorithms could scour our chatter feeds and find new ideas any day of the week.

  But if it were that easy, why does Deva need me?

  On the Auto ride back to my grandparents’ place, deep indigos and scarlets collide in a glorious sunset. We bump along the cobblestone path circling the edge of a sparkling lake where swans and geese and pedestrians enjoy the evening air. Despite the beauty, homesickness hits me hard, and I fiercely miss the barren rocks and red dirt of Tri-Rock’s sweeping landscape.

  As I run inside the mansion, I’m breathless with the intensity of my feelings, of wanting to go home. In the kitchen, Mom squabbles with Cook about the proper amount of masala for tonight’s dosa wraps. Nani is in her study, video chatting with another diplomat. On the way upstairs, I catch Nana fiddling with the bow on a wrapped present.

  It’s my seventeenth birthday. I never thought I would live to see it.

  Time is so precious, and our human bodies are so frail.

  And suddenly I’m afraid of everything at once: afraid of dying without ever setting foot in the Beltway again, afraid of returning to Tri-Rock and missing out on all the advances and wonders of the Inner Galaxy. Afraid of growing old and having never accomplished anything, having never created even one great work of art that lives beyond me.

  There are so many choices, and I want to experience them all.

  Why do I feel as if there’s not enough time?

  In my room, I frantically call Nikhil, and when he answers I sag with relief. We laugh and talk about nothing, and he wishes me a happy birthday. And I can tell from his soft gaze that I’m still his precious tomato.

  That night, my family eats too much masala dosa and too much birthday cake and gives me too many presents I don’t need. We are left in a coma of excess. My heart is as heavy as my stomach, and it’s probably the worst state for any sort of epiphany.

  And yet I have one.

  I want it all. Why can’t I have it?

  Everything clicks together: how to live my life, how to instill freshness into the process of planetary creation, and most of all, how to answer Deva’s proposal. My brain whirs with ideas, churning them out in a sugar-fueled rage. Ideas that even Deva hasn’t considered.

  In my dreams that night, I seek it out, offering my terms and conditions. Time with Mom on Tri-Rock, art school in the Beltway, visits back here to see my grandparents and father. The chance to fall in love, to grow old, and everything that may come in between.

  Deva will have to wait one lifetime, but what is that to an entity thousands of years old?

  And in return, I will offer the secrets to keeping the loop open.

  9a 88 2b 3d 93 49 bc 42 25 cb 83 d9 fc aa c3 2f 4f 75 10 00 67 42 2f c7 92

  I am Leela.

  I am binary and hexadecimal, bytes and registers and gates.

  I create dynamic flows and spontaneous reactions.

  I control a galaxy.

  I am never frozen in a single moment, instead eternally a force for movement and energy and light.

  I am forever.

  I am Human.

  a9 25 90 1f 77 69 cd 4b eb d5 f5 12 eb 35 45 53 8a 8e 49 62 ce 9f 92 19 28

  Author’s Note

  In ancient Indian texts, Dwaraka (or Dwarka) is the name of a mystical ocean city where every home is a crystal palace and even the barns are encrusted in jewels. Its ruler, Krishna, was born human and raised as the son of an ordinary cowherd, though he was actually the avatar of a great deity sent to Earth to battle evil. When Krishna’s people needed an escape from war and ruin, the glimmering fortress city appeared on a cloud of sea foam—a beckoning salvation from a ravaging army.

  Dwaraka was eventually destroyed, swallowed by the sea, but the allure of utopia and an escape from our own mortality remains. In PRINCESS I enjoyed exploring that temptation as Leela, too, seeks refuge from death. Here, utopia has become a place where benevolent artificial intelligence provides luxury and comfort, battles the aging process, and even offers a path to immortality for a select few.

  Writers, of course, seek immortality through our words. When I saw the submissions call for the FORESHADOW digital anthology, I had a hunch it would be something special. The project was so thoughtfully designed to bring out new voices, especially marginalized voices. We were given space to shine alongside the most popular YA authors of our time, and on top of that our stories were each introduced by a powerhouse name. It was an incredible honor to be in the midst of so much talent and passion.

  It proved to be an important stepping-stone for me as well. The story attracted interest from literary agents and an invitation from a book packager to pen a YA rom-com. As of writing this note, I’ve signed with an amazing agent and am working away on the rom-com. Thank you readers, supporters, and FORESHADOW for keeping my dreams alive!

  Worldbuilding in PRINCESS

  by Emily X.R. Pan

  While all fiction exists in an invented space of some kind, the most obvious worldbuilding can be seen in systems of magic, fantasy countries with their own political complexities, and dreamed-up planets and technologies.

  In PRINCESS, through economical use of the just-right details, Maya Prasad manages to do tremendous worldbuilding in the small space of the short story.

  We know from the opening words (“Outside the Galaxy Class C shuttle . . .”) that the narrator is somewhere in outer space. The second paragraph adds even more layers:

  . . . a mechanical limb extends to grab our things from the overhead compartment. It’s not just a luggage cart; it’s a Luggage Cart. An artificially intelligent machine designed to do something that humans in the Beltway still do themselves.

  The capitalization of “Luggage Cart” is worldbuilding shorthand, but it’s also delivered with sarcasm that shapes our sense of who the narrator is.

  Prasad could have chosen any random object to mechanize, but the luggage cart tells us her characters are traveling somewhere significant.

  The final sentence of this paragraph, with its mention of the Beltway, hammers home the concept of AI vs. humans.

  Here is the genius of Prasad’s story: The world itself provides the stakes. Every detail is critical to the rising action and rising stakes of Prasad’s story. She offers information about her setting and the rules of the world in places where it’s immediately relevant, as in this passage that tells us something significant about Leela’s mother, the atmosphere of the place where she’s arrived and the one she’s left behind, and the circumstances of her voyage:

  I can hardly believe that I’m finally going to breathe the oxygenated air of Dwaraka, the planet my mother ran away from seventeen years ago when she was pregnant with me. . . . What a luxury it would all be if making this trip had been a choice.

  Even when the details are strung seamlessly into the plot, they are most effective and memorable when they reveal something essential to that moment in the story. We are already deep into PRINCESS when we learn just how interdependent the stakes and the rules of the world are:

  “Our Surgeons can remove it, I’m happy to say.” Dr. Banerji glances at me. “However, she must be connected to the Grid before we can operate.”

  For a writer, fan of science fiction or not, it’s useful to study examples like PRINCESS because the invention is so clear. But worldbuilding is just as crucial in stories with entirely realistic settings. We see this in writing that captures the sense of being lost in a big city, or the specific beauties and sounds of Appalachia, or other places readers may never have been. Few experiences are as magical as that feeling that the words on a page have teleported your entire body to another place.

  Story Prompt: Fleshing Out the World

  As you imagine the elements of your story’s world, ask yourself these questions:

  •Am I giving out pieces of information at the correct times, when they are most interesting to the reader and most needed for the story?

  •Are any of my details for this world extraneous? What purpose(s) do they all serve?

  •Why must the world be like this? What are the causes and what are the consequences?

  •Why does this particular story need to be told in this specific world?

  Fools

  Gina Chen

  “With FOOLS, Gina Chen has written a lush, compelling fantasy that transports the reader to a very unusual island. The main character, Fanny, is instantly lovable (despite her apparent lack of a heart), and the moment I hit the last page of this jewel of a story, I was desperate for more.”

  —Sabaa Tahir, author of An Ember in the Ashes

  Ahma says my parents were a pair of fools. Runaways, who bartered the promise of my mother’s womb to a witch to escape a kingdom that would sooner see them dead than in love. The witch spun a cloak that would hide them from all eyes except for those of the gods, and my parents sailed away from their homeland with only the stars as witness.

  My mother bore me a year later and cradled me under that useless cloak until the witch came to collect, guided by my traitorous howling. I used to say it wasn’t my fault we were found, that the cloak was supposed to hide us from everyone, and Ahma would only respond, “Incorrect.”

  But I don’t blame the witch for taking me: a promise is a promise. My pure heart, hours old, would make her a fine batch of potions. She nipped it out as gently as she would pluck a flower bud, then brought me to her sister’s island at the edge of the world, where trees grow as tall as mountains and a manor roots itself among them—glossy as hemlock, white as beech, gnarled as oak, with towers branching off in every direction of the sun.