Emergency Skin

A colonist is sent back to Earth, the planet his ancestors left centuries ago. They were the people who called themselves the best humanity had to offer, and they founded a new world far away. His task is to collect a sample of the HeLa cell line.

His briefing leaves no room for doubt. Earth is a graveyard, and the people who stayed behind are hopeless and unbeautiful. His orders: slip in, slip out, and avoid staring. What he finds is a planet that has recovered, and the recovery seems tied to the colonists' people no longer being on it.

An artificial intelligence embedded in his skull narrates in the second person. It gives him his orders and supplies his history, and it is an unreliable narrator. As the world before him contradicts the one it describes, the voice grows more strained.

This is science fiction in short form, a novelette of under forty pages meant to be read in one sitting. Its argument is pointed and compact. It concerns extraction and mutualism, the question of who a society judges worth saving, and the tales an elite tells to excuse abandoning others.

It is the third entry in the Forward collection from Amazon Original Stories (September 2019) and won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.