Scholastic Writing Awards Silver Key, Speculative Fiction

Humans evolved around the warm glow of fires. Freed from the darkness and the raw mess of uncooked meat, we told stories in circles—stories of defeating beasts, building cities of stone and timber, taming what once frightened us. Once we overcame the night, we began conquering everything else: forests, rivers, even the air. Advancement after advancement, we distinguished ourselves from the unruly natural order of life. We carved an ornate container for our species.

The cold light of electricity replaced the glow of fires. Then the bluer, hungrier glow of screens replaced even that. The family that once huddled by the hearth now stands apart, heads bowed to individual halos of light.

All we know is brightness at the center and darkness everywhere else.

Saturday, June 25, 2040

A fluffy puppy skids across a kitchen floor. Children shriek as their sled flies over a bump. A woman evaluates an eyeshadow palette. A man dices a shallot into perfect cubes.

The clips stream past Marla’s eyes as she wakes. The headset sits sixteen inches from her face—DeepBlue-certified. She sips a flow of electrolyte-enhanced liquid, the kind her mother once insisted was “practically a full meal.” Back when they still commented on each other’s diets.

A message pops up in the upper corner, “Have you seen this one? I’m dead.”

Catherine. Her closest friend, though they’ve never exchanged voices—only pastel cookies and reaction clips.

A red line bleeds across the top of the display.

Marla blinks once. Twice. Holding her breath on the third. The line only spreads, a digital wound tearing downward.

Come on… please.

She tries to close the app, realizing she cannot remember the last time she turned the headset off. Did her mother ever turn hers off? Not since installation day, when DeepBlue staff replaced the living room furniture with sleek lounge chairs “to optimize posture for long-term immersion.”

She lifts trembling hands toward her headset.

She lifts trembling hands toward her headset.

Darkness slams over her.
A darkness with texture—heavy, uncurated. The headset in her hands still chatters with autoplayed clips, though her vision is black. Her neck cracks painfully as she turns it; her vertebrae feel like brittle paper.

A warm glow slowly enters her vision. The moon.

Marla locates the edge of her lounge chair and pushes herself upright. Her feet touch the floor—foreign, heavy. She stands.

The room comes into focus. Starlight streams through the far window, barely illuminating the shapes of other lounge chairs in the room. Dust in corners she didn’t know existed.

She walks slowly to the window. Three-quarters full, haloed in an orange ring, the moon stares down solemnly at her.

How long have we been here?

Marla walks over to her mother’s lounge. She would have to tell her mother. Her mother’s hair is leaking out behind her headset at a strange angle, her braid forming an odd, stiff L shape against the headrest. It is disturbingly unruly and dirty. Extending a trembling hand, Marla grasps her mother’s shoulder and whispers. Her voice feels like a wrung-out towel, barely enough power to force out, “Mom… Mom, I need your help.”

Nothing. Not a hint of recognition. She then tries to yank her headset off, but it's glued to her face. A line of blue text flashes:

UPLOAD COMPLETE FOR MICHELLE DONOVAN.

Her mother’s pulse is warm under Marla’s fingers.

She staggers to the front door. Opening it feels like prying open a ribcage. Outside, everything is eerily pristine—the trimmed lawn, her scooter half-folded, the same way she left it eighteen months ago. Nothing has shifted. Nothing has lived.

Her headset shrieks from inside the house.

She collapses to the ground.

Saturday, July 1st, 2040

Marla wakes, standing, held in a metallic brace that bites into her temples—blue light pulses from the walls.

DeepBlue Co.—the ultimate solution to human suffering.

She tries to lift her arms; an invisible restraint holds them. A projection appears:

CONNECTION STABLE.

She feels fine. The world feels sharp and awake, probably because of the IV tubes delivering a clear liquid into her body. She could hear the faint steps outside the doors and distant murmurs down the hallway.

Mom. Where is Mom?

“She’s all right.”

A woman in a white lab coat with a clipboard steps into view. “My name is Dr Adrian Waltz,” she says. “Head technician, DeepBlue U.S. division. You’ve been with us for eighteen months.”

“Where is my mom? Why can’t she hear me?” said Marla, gnashing her teeth together.

“She can,” Adrian says gently. “Just not here. She’s fully integrated into Bluecloud.”

“You killed her.”

“No.” A surprisingly soft laugh. “Marla, why would we kill our users? They are the whole point of this project. Your mother is alive. In fact, more alive than she ever allowed herself to be. You know how she was. Always careful. Always worried. Always curating her love into something quiet and half-swallowed.”

Marla freezes as if the walls are swallowing her whole.

How does she know that?

Adrian continues, “You contacted her fewer than seven times in the last year. Yet she saved hundreds of clips of you—every message, every shared video. She lingered on them far longer than you ever lingered on hers.”

“You don’t know anything about us,” she says. Adrian’s words poke her heart with a piece of hot iron, fuming with the heat of embarrassment and guilt.

“I know what she chose to upload,” Adrian answers. “And soon you’ll understand why she chose it.”

Marla tenses. “What is Bluecloud? Don’t give me the brochure version. Tell me what it is.”

Adrian pauses—then nods, as though giving Marla a point in an unspoken test.

“It’s a cognitive scaffold,” she explains. “A world built from human minds—memories, habits, values, desires. Not fantasies. The real things people hide behind small talk, politeness, and fear. When users upload, they enter a shared mental ecosystem where those truths interact without barriers.”

“Does it hurt them?” Marla asks.

“No. They don’t even lose consciousness. They simply… transition. Their minds continue where their bodies stop.”

“So their bodies are useless to you.”

“Unused,” Adrian corrects. “But cared for. Fed, hydrated, kept warm. We are not butchers, Marla. We don’t harm anyone. We give them what they’ve always wanted: a world without misinterpretation.”

Marla sets her jaw, a small tectonic shift under the skin. “Show me.”

The request seems to catch on something inside Adrian—she stills, eyes narrowing as if recalibrating. Then, with a slow press of her thumb, she taps a button on the console beside them.

The air ripples.

A window unfurls like a sheet of silk pulled taut: Marla’s mother appears beneath a tree stitched from soft gold. The light pools in the folds of her clothing, in the hollows of her cheeks. She is laughing—an open, ringing sound Marla hasn’t heard in years, the sound of a kettle just before it boils over. Her braid is smooth again, obedient to gravity.

Marla takes half a step forward, her ribs tightening around her breath. “Is this real?” she whispers, afraid a louder voice might shatter it.

“It is her,” Adrian says. “Not a puppet. Not a mask. Her mind, without hesitation, like a river once blocked, is now running the way it always wanted to.”

Marla watches the slight movements of her mother’s hands—animated, articulate, carving shapes in the air. Those hands used to flutter like that when telling stories on long car rides. Then the fluttering stopped, replaced by the quiet mechanical gestures of someone conserving warmth.

“How did you—”
The question fractures midair. Something sharp clicks into place in her mind.
“You said users upload what they’re afraid to say. So how do you know? How do you see what they don’t show?”

Adrian’s smile loosens, then slides away entirely. Her face becomes a still pond.
“You want my story,” she says quietly. “Then ask for it.”

Marla steadies her breath, though it trembles as a thread pulled too tight. “Tell me why you built this.”

A long silence stretches between them, thin as blown glass.

“When I’m young,” Adrian begins, “my mother loves me like a storm warning. Every affection comes folded inside fear—fear I’ll fail, fear I’ll leave, fear I’ll repeat her mistakes. She never tells me what she truly feels. Only what she hopes I’ll avoid.”

She looks down, jaw working. “I spend years guessing which version of her is real—the woman who tucks me in or the one who wakes me at four a.m. to review exam topics.”

A shallow breath escapes her. “When she dies, I realise I never knew. Not for certain. We live entire lives translating one another badly. Bluecloud ends that. No more guessing in the dark.”

Marla shakes her head, her movements small, almost instinctive, like a moth shaking dust from its wings. “But people need mystery. Choice. Privacy.”

“And look where privacy brought your family,” Adrian murmurs. “Eighteen months in the same room, each orbiting your own blue sun. Not one shared meal. Not one moment of looking fully at each other.”

Adrian’s gaze pierces softly, not cruelly. “Your mother cried for you more times in the upload logs than she allowed herself to cry in the physical world.”

Marla inhales sharply, as if someone has knocked the air out of her. “She cried?”

“Every night,” Adrian says, almost apologetically. “But you never saw it. Neither of you lifted your head from the glow long enough.”

Marla closes her eyes. The darkness behind her eyelids feels heavier than before, like wet cloth. “So what now? You strap me in and decide I belong there too?”

“No,” Adrian says. “Only if you want it.”

Marla’s eyes snap open. “What?”

“I’m not a monster,” Adrian says simply. “Uploading requires willingness. Your mother chose. Your father chose. Most of the world chooses. If you refuse—” She gestures gently toward the door. “You walk out. Back to the house that hasn’t changed in eighteen months. Back to dust and the thin silence of guessing.”

Marla stares, her throat tightening. Her hands curl unconsciously into her palms, crescents forming in her skin.

“Then why restrain me?” she asks.

“Because your body shut down when you stepped outside,” Adrian replies. “Your nervous system nearly collapsed. We stabilised you. That’s all.”

Something inside Marla loosens—not relief exactly, but a knot unspooling. “Show me my mother again,” she whispers.

The golden tree returns, blooming back into view. Her mother is mid-story now—a camping trip from when Marla was seven, before life narrowed into screens and schedules. Her voice carries warmth, a steady confidence, like sunlight spreading across a table.

Marla’s hand lifts almost involuntarily, fingertips brushing the projection. The surface yields, rippling like the skin of a pond.

“Mom…”

Her mother looks up. Her smile is immediate, instinctive, unshielded—an expression Marla recognises only from the edges of memory, from a time before both of them learned to ration their feelings like scarce resources.

And in that small, shining moment, Marla feels a question stirring in her chest like those vintage spinning machines that people wash clothes with:

What if clarity is not a blade, but a balm? What if mercy looks like this?

Marla reaches toward the projection again, her hand hovering in the faint warmth radiating from her mother’s golden tree. The pixels shimmer as if breathing. Her mother’s laughter—unrestrained, familiar in shape but unfamiliar in freedom—unfurls like a scent from childhood she thought she had forgotten.

Adrian stands quietly beside her. Not triumphant. Not waiting. Simply… there.

“You said she accepted,” Marla says, barely above a whisper. “She wanted this?”

“She wanted to stop guessing whether you loved her,” Adrian says softly. “And she wanted you to stop guessing too.”

Heat rises in Marla’s neck. She remembers her mother leaning over old homework pages, saying Sweetheart, just try again, in a voice that always felt both careful and constrained. She remembers hearing her mother’s nighttime footsteps—soft, deliberate—as if love itself needed to tiptoe. She remembers the braid that once signified order, discipline, gentleness, now stiff with neglect, back in the lounge chair.

“Can she hear me?” Marla asks.

“In a way. Your minds would need to be in proximity. The upload is relational.”

Marla studies the golden world shimmering in the air. Her mother is gesturing animatedly to other figures—strangers or not-quite-strangers, minds threaded beside hers. There is colour in her cheeks. A looseness in her posture. A brightness that does not feel artificial.

A different kind of light seems to pulse under the cold blue of the room—something warm, steady, like a forgotten hearth.

“What does it feel like?” Marla asks. “The transition.”

“Like opening a curtain in a room you didn’t realise was dark,” Adrian says. “The brightness overwhelms you. Then you realise the view has always been there.”

Marla looks at her own hands—thin, almost translucent from disuse. She thinks of the lounge chair at home, shaped to her body like a cast. Thinks of the puppy clips, the nutritionally dense sludge, the soft hiss of hydration lines. The cold blue light that never warms, only illuminates.

“Will I die?” she asks.

“No,” Adrian says. “Your body will rest. Your mind will continue. You won’t lose yourself. You will simply stop being alone.”

That last sentence lands with unexpected weight, clean, unavoidable, as if a small stone has been dropped directly into the centre of her chest. The ripple spreads outward. Marla feels the ache of eighteen silent months not as a thought but as a physical bruise blooming under her ribs. She sees again the family room swaddled in the blue light that flattens shadows but never warms a thing.

She remembers Catherine’s pastel-cookie messages drifting across her vision in soft, sugary colors, each one bright enough to tug her attention away, just slightly, from the shape of her mother’s body in the next chair. Her mother’s breathing had become part of the room’s white noise—a soft, steady engine she rarely bothered to locate. Now the memory stings: the way she had accepted that hum as proof of presence, rather than turning her head even once to see how her mother was curled or whether her braid needed untangling.

She thinks of the moon she saw after removing the headset, ghostly and swollen at the window. A moon she had forgotten existed, like an old childhood friend whose number she lost. She remembers how it felt—warm as breath compared to the sterile glow of the screen. It had startled her, that softness. The fact that the world still offered it.

A warmth floods her throat, thick and humming. Not tears, not fully, but something with the same salt.

This—this awareness crawling through her, limb by limb—feels like stepping into a room she had lived in for years but never bothered to light. Every object inside it seems to float into view at once: her mother’s braids, her own hunched spine, the way she fed herself through plastic straws, the months measured in autoplay.

Eighteen months of not looking.

Subtle as a pulse returning to a sleeping limb, Marla makes her decision in this sterile blue room. Painful, yes, but also proof of circulation. Proof of awakening.

She steps closer to the projection.

“What if I regret it?” she asks. “What if I don’t fit in that kind of clarity?”

“Clarity isn’t perfection,” Adrian replies. “It is truth without disguise. And Marla… you have worn so many disguises for so long, you don’t know which ones belong to you. Bluecloud won’t erase them. It will show you which are real.”

Marla swallows. “Will I be able to talk to her?”

“You will be able to hear her.”

Her throat tightens.

“Do it,” Marla says.

Adrian does not move immediately. She studies Marla’s face with a deliberate slowness. Her gaze moves not just across features but into the small tremors beneath them. She is searching—not for obedience, not for panic, but for the faint glint of a readiness that is not free of fear but shaped around it.

“Marla,” she says quietly, “this must be your choice.”

“It is,” Marla answers. “For once.”

The restraints loosen with a soft hiss, like old bandages peeling from skin. Marla’s muscles twitch under the sudden responsibility of holding her own weight. Adrian steadies her, guides her to the reclining surface. The chair exhales beneath her like something relieved to finally receive her intentionally.

“This is the last moment you’ll see this room,” Adrian says.

But Marla is not looking at the room. She is looking at the golden tree and the woman beneath it—her mother, Michelle Donovan, sunlight moving softly through her hair. Her mother lifts her face as though sensing a shift. As though part of her already knows.

Marla’s chest tightens painfully. “I never really saw her,” she says. “Not the real her.”

“You will,” Adrian says.

A soft glow begins to fill the headset, warm as firelight, steady as breath. It wraps around Marla’s vision, stretching the space between one heartbeat and the next. Her thoughts loosen. Her breath becomes lighter, as though the air itself rearranges to hold her.

Then, like stepping through a thin membrane, she stands beneath the golden tree.

The air here is warm, textured. Leaves shimmer with tiny fragments of sound—laughter, lullabies, murmured confessions she recognises but has never truly heard. Figures move at the edges of perception, minds brushing lightly against hers, open but not invasive.

Her mother rises slowly from the grass. Not startled. Not fearful. As if she had been waiting under this tree for a very long time.

“Hi, Mom,” Marla says.

Her mother’s face opens into something raw, luminous, unmistakably real.

“Oh, Marla,” she breathes, voice trembling with recognition and relief, “there you are.”