cognitive_drift

Cognitive Drift

Short story by Marlon Barrios Solano January 26th 2026

She had finished The Parable of the Sower three nights before, but the book had not finished with her.

It stayed in her body like a second nervous system.
Not the plot so much as the feeling: that the future was not an event but a pressure, a weather system already inside the bones.

Hyperempathy, Butler called it.

Erica did not believe she felt other people’s pain literally. She was too trained in skepticism for that. But she did believe this: that some histories sensitized you. That some lineages made you porous.

She was twenty-two, in Northampton, Massachusetts, in a rented room above the bakery where she worked three mornings a week and one evening.

She liked those mornings.

She arrived before sunrise, when the town still belonged to delivery trucks and birds. She tied her hair back, washed her hands, and slid trays into ovens that glowed like small, contained suns. By seven, the air was thick with sugar and yeast and heat. By nine, professors and students lined up for croissants and coffee, speaking softly, as if inside a chapel.

It was honest work.
Predictable.
The opposite of rockets.

She studied physics at UMass Amherst, cross-registered through the Five Colleges. She took one seminar each semester at Smith College.

When people asked her what she wanted to be, she said it without hesitation, as if saying it could protect it.

Rocket.
Scientist.

She liked the way the words resisted metaphor.

Rocket.
Science.

They were clean words.
They did not carry blood.
They did not carry history.
They carried vectors.

She wanted a life made of trajectories and thrust and escape velocity. A life in which the future could be calculated.

That was where she met her first girlfriend.

They sat next to each other in a literature-and-futures class, both pretending not to be nervous. Her girlfriend — she still couldn’t say the word without feeling the ghost of a smile — had her blond hair always half tied, half falling, and the habit of underlining sentences as if she were trying to rescue them.

It was she who pressed Butler into Erica’s hands.

“You should read this,” she said. “It’s not really science fiction. It’s more like… preparation.”

Preparation.

The word landed with more force than the book.

Her parents’ words had always carried preparation.

They were survivalists, but not in the way the documentaries showed. No bunkers in the woods, no fantasies of lone white men with rifles. They prepared because they had once had to run.

Her grandmother had run from Mississippi.
Her father had run from a town in Alabama where a cross burned once and was enough.
They stocked water, batteries, canned food, not for the end of the world but for the next time the world decided to remind them who it belonged to.

Preparedness was not paranoia.
It was inheritance.

Now, in 2026, she read Butler and thought:
So this is what realism looks like when it becomes prophecy.

She tried the communes, intellectually.

Back to the land.
Collective care.
New kinships.

She watched documentaries about the sixties: domes in Colorado, gardens in California, white bodies in fields discovering vegetables and each other. She admired the courage, the refusal of capitalism, the experiments in living.

But something in it felt… soft.
Soft in a way her history did not permit.

Too hippie, she thought, and hated herself for the word.

She did not trust utopias built on forgetting.

She trusted systems.
Equations.
Trajectories.

She trusted the idea that if you understood the forces, you could leave.

And yet.

Mars.

She listened to Elon Musk late at night, after closing shifts at the bakery, after problem sets, after texting her girlfriend sentences that were almost confessions. Not because she believed him, exactly, but because he spoke in the language she already loved.

Thrust.
Mass.
Velocity.
Escape.

Multi-planetary species.
Backup civilization.
A future that did not depend on the moral improvement of the present.

One night, while the ovens cooled downstairs and the town went dark, her phone vibrated.

An email.

Subject line:
SpaceX Internship Program — Decision

She did not open it for six full minutes.

She sat on the edge of the bed and thought, absurdly, of her grandmother packing a bag in silence.

Then she tapped.

We are pleased to offer you a position…

She read the sentence three times.

Full support.
Housing near the launch site.
Access clearance.
A trajectory, officially assigned.

Her hands were shaking.

She texted her girlfriend first.

GF: are you breathing
GF: because I’m not

Then:

GF: I’m proud of you in a way that scares me

And later:

GF: just promise me you won’t let them turn you into a planet

She could have flown.

The offer included transit.
Carbon-neutral flights.
A relocation stipend.

But that was not the real reason.

The real reason had been lying on the coffee table for months.

Her roommate studied psychology.

Clinical track.
Obsessed with ethics.
Always leaving half-read articles around the apartment like traps.

One afternoon, between shifts, Erica picked up a printed paper with coffee stains in the margins.

The title was strange enough to slow her down:

On the Correlation Between Long-Range Travel and Cognitive Drift in High-Value Technical Subjects

It wasn’t famous.
Not peer-reviewed yet.
Just a speculative preprint her roommate had downloaded.

She read it standing up.

The paper claimed, cautiously, that extended overland travel — unstructured, human-scale movement — produced measurable changes in ethical reasoning. That exposure to strangers, risk, dependency, generosity, altered how people later designed systems of power.

Most of it was tentative.

But one sentence stayed.

She underlined it with a pen that wasn’t hers:

Trajectories designed by people who have only moved through controlled systems tend to optimize for exit rather than repair.

She put the paper back.

She did not mention it to anyone.

When the internship offer arrived, she understood immediately.

If she was going to help design exits from the planet,
she did not want to arrive as a closed system.

She wanted noise in her data.

She wanted drift.

So she hitchhiked.

Not as protest.
Not as poverty.
As calibration.

She left Northampton in early spring with a backpack, her laptop, Butler’s book, and a notebook she never used for equations, only for sentences.

She rode with a retired couple through Pennsylvania who talked about drought.
With a truck driver in Tennessee who listened to conspiracy podcasts and offered her oranges.
With a graduate student in Louisiana who asked her what she believed in.

“I believe in trajectories,” she said.
“And in perturbations.”

The South unfolded slowly.

Pine.
Dust.
Billboards for guns and Jesus and storage units.

She received another text on the third day.

GF: remember Butler’s rule
GF: God is Change
GF: not God is Mars

At night she read Butler again and underlined:

All that you touch you change.
All that you change changes you.

By the time she reached Boca Chica, she was exhausted in a way that felt historical.

Starbase was not a city.

It was scaffolding pretending to be destiny.

Metal towers.
White cylinders.
Fences.
Badges.
Trailers.
Engineers in shorts with laptops and sunburns.

A temporary civilization organized around a single vertical dream.

She showed her provisional badge at the gate.

Intern.

The word felt unreal in her mouth.

She found a place on the sand with a few other spectators. Workers. Journalists. Locals who had learned to read the sky.

The rocket stood impossibly tall, obscene and beautiful.

She thought:

This is what science looks like when it becomes theology.
This is what liberation looks like when it requires priviledge.

The countdown began.

She felt, suddenly, a strange echo of her parents’ drills.
Preparation.
Waiting.
The moment before running.

Ignition.

The ground vibrated like a restrained animal.
Fire.
Noise erasing thought.

The rocket lifted, slow, dignified, as if it were not fighting gravity but negotiating with it.

For a few seconds, she believed.

In Mars.
In escape.
In a future clean enough to start over.

Then the sound changed.

A hesitation.
A wrongness.

The explosion was not cinematic.

It was abrupt.
A tearing with a delay.

A bloom of fire in mid-air, like a flower that had mistaken itself for a star.

Debris fell.

Silence arrived too quickly.

Around her, people exhaled, cursed, recorded, called someone.

Her phone vibrated.

GF: so
GF: is this the future
GF: or just another experiment

Erica did not answer.

She thought of the bakery.

Of heat contained.
Of small, reliable ovens.
Of dough that rose only because someone stayed long enough to tend it.

She thought of Butler again.

Not of Mars.

Of Earthseed.

Of the idea that the future was not elsewhere.

That survival was not departure.

That community was not a place but a practice.

She wrote one sentence in her notebook:

Maybe the first thing an engineer should design is her own way of arriving.

She did not know yet whether she would become a rocket scientist.

She only knew this:

The explosion had not disappointed her.

It had instructed her.