Read Orris, an exclusive sci-fi short story from Arkady Martine

In a future where climate change has devastated Florence’s iris fields, a perfumer makes a hard choice in the Hugo award-winning novelist Arkady Martine’s short story

By Arkady Martine

Elena could give the lecture half-asleep. She’d done it more than once: earbuds shoved in haphazard in the dark and micbead balanced on her sternum, the rest of her cocooned in 30 pounds of weighted blanket. Warm, serene and bodiless. When she needed to do an onboarding for someone in a time zone radically askew to her circadians, she’d even skip VR. The lecture didn’t need an image, just a voice. In Elena’s opinion, it worked better with just a voice. She had the data analytics to prove it, and those data analytics earned her the top end of her salary band. …