Celeste Morales filled out the interest form at 11:47 PM on a Thursday, three months and twelve days after her last text from her mother. The form was sparse asking name, age, occupation, a single essay prompt: “Why do you want to transcend?”
She typed: “I need to start over.”
She didn’t submit it immediately. Instead, she sat with her laptop open, cursor hovering over the send button, and thought about whether that was true. Did she want to start over, or did she want to disappear? The distinction felt important but she couldn’t quite articulate why.
She pressed send at midnight.
Three weeks later, after she’d forgotten about it entirely, her phone rang. An unknown number. She almost didn’t answer.
“Ms. Morales? This is Diana Chen from Alpha Global Technologies. We’re pleased to inform you that your interest application has been accepted. We look forward to meeting you.”
The woman’s voice was smooth, professional, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who had never doubted anything in her life.
“I…” Celeste glanced around her studio apartment: the dishes in the sink, the laundry piling up in the corner, the empty wine bottles she kept meaning to recycle. “When?”
“Your interview is scheduled for next Thursday at 2 PM. You’ll receive all the details via email within the hour. Do you have any questions?”
Celeste had a thousand questions. She asked none of them.
“No. Thank you.”
“Wonderful. We’re very excited about you, Celeste.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Excellent. See you next week.”
The call ended. Celeste sat in the silence of her apartment and felt something shift inside her chest—not quite hope, but close enough.
The interview took place in a sleek office building in downtown Seattle, all glass and steel and the kind of minimalism that cost more money than Celeste made in a year. Diana Chen was waiting for her in a conference room on the forty-third floor.
She was younger than Celeste expected, maybe mid-thirties, with sharp cheekbones and eyes that seemed to catalog everything about you in a single glance. She gestured for Celeste to sit.
“So, Celeste. Tell me about your life.”
It was not a question Celeste had been prepared to answer. She’d expected something more specific. She talked about growing up in Las Vegas, about her nursing degree, about her job at a mid-size hospital where she’d worked the same rotation for five years. She talked about the distance between herself and her family, her mother’s disappointment, her father’s silence, her brother’s judgment. She didn’t talk about the nights she’d spent alone in her apartment, wondering if there was something fundamentally wrong with her, something that made her unable to connect to the people she was supposed to love.
Diana listened without interrupting. When Celeste finished, Diana slid a stack of papers across the table.
“We’ll need access to your medical history, your financial records, your educational background. Full access, without reservation. This is non-negotiable.”
Celeste read through the legalese. It was comprehensive. Alpha Global Technologies would know everything including every doctor’s visit, every credit card purchase, every grade she’d received since elementary school.
“Is that a problem?” Diana asked.
Celeste thought about her empty apartment and her empty life. She signed.
A week later, a thin envelope arrived with a plane ticket inside. The letter was brief:
Dear Ms. Morales,
Congratulations. You have been accepted into the preliminary phase of our transformation program. Your plane departs Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on March 15th at 6:15 AM, arriving in Anchorage at 9:30 AM. A car will be waiting to transport you to Novalis.
Please bring:- weather appropriate clothing – Any necessary medications- Government-issued identification- Nothing else.
Upon arrival, you will be assigned housing and reporting to the Novalis Medical Center as a triage nurse. Your role will be to assist in the care of applicants currently in the program and residents of the city. Detailed instructions regarding your position, living arrangements, and the application timeline will be provided upon arrival.
Welcome to the next phase of humanity.
Alpha Global Technologies
The ticket felt thin in her hands, fragile, like it might disappear if she wasn’t careful.
She met Jonas on the plane.
He was sitting in the row across from her, a tall man with dark hair going gray at the temples and the kind of tired eyes that came from a life spent caring for other people. They didn’t talk much until they were waiting for baggage claim in Anchorage, and then it was only because Jonas dropped his ticket and Celeste picked it up.
“Going to Novalis?” she asked, handing it back.
He looked at the ticket in his hand, then at her, with an expression of mild disbelief. “Yeah. You too?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your job?”
“Triage nurse. You?”
“I have no idea,” Jonas said. “I’m a teacher. Was a teacher. Gave up tenure and everything. I’m assuming they have some use for me, or I wouldn’t be here.”
Celeste studied him. He looked nervous in a way she recognized—the nervous of someone who had made an impulsive decision and was now questioning it in the harsh light of reality.
“I get it,” she said.
They didn’t exchange contact information or make plans to meet up. But when they walked out to the parking lot and saw the identical black cars waiting for them, with an identical black-suited driver holding a sign with their names, Celeste felt a small comfort in the fact that she wasn’t alone in this. That whatever Novalis was, Jonas would be there too.
She didn’t know then that this would matter.
The drive to Novalis took three hours. The landscape transformed gradually from the flat sprawl of Anchorage to mountains and then to something starker—tundra, endless and white and empty. The driver didn’t speak. The road seemed to exist in isolation from the rest of the world.
And then, quite suddenly, there was the city.
It rose up from the tundra like something out of a dream, all clean lines and gleaming surfaces, towers of glass and steel catching the weak afternoon sunlight. The architecture was futuristic but not cold—there were curves and organics mixed in with the geometric severity, gardens visible through the transparent walls of some buildings, walkways that seemed to float between structures. It looked like what people had imagined the future would be, back before the future became something mundane.
The driver pulled up to a residential building, all cream-colored stone and wide windows, and gestured for her to get out.
“This is your housing assignment,” he said. His voice was flat, without inflection. “Your welcome packet is on the bed. Report to the medical center tomorrow at 0600 hours. You’ll find the address in your packet.”
Celeste grabbed her small bag from the trunk. By the time she turned around, the car was already pulling away.
The apartment building was located on the east side of Novalis, close enough to the bustling city center that she could hear the distant hum of activity. The unit itself was small but clean – one bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and living area. The kind of space designed to be functional rather than comfortable. On the bed was a folder—cream-colored, embossed with the Alpha Global Technologies logo.
Beside it was a bracelet. A thin string of what looked like woven light, with a single gold bead threaded through it. It glowed faintly in the dimness of the room.
Celeste picked it up. It was warm to the touch.
She sat on the bed and opened the folder.
Inside was a welcome letter, printed on heavy stock paper. It thanked her for her commitment to transcendence and outlined the basic rules of the city: curfew at 10 PM, mandatory weekly check-ins at the medical center, weekly contraceptive injections, no unauthorized contact outside the city, no recording devices, no weapons. The letter ended with a note: Your identification bracelet must be worn at all times. It will grant you access to hopeful-designated areas and services.
There was a calendar showing the dates when vampires would be permitted on the surface—roughly sixty days scattered throughout the year when the sun didn’t rise. Most of those dates were in November and December and January. The rest were scattered through the spring and fall.
There was information about the mail system (slow, monitored), the contact system (limited, monitored), the blood donation schedule (Wednesdays and Fridays, 3 PM, noted as “voluntary”), and a schedule of appointments she needed to make before her “transfusion candidacy interview” – psychological evaluations, blood work, drug screening.
At the bottom of the packet was a single sheet listing the “success rate” of the transformation as “high,” with a small asterisk. Celeste flipped through every page in the packet twice, looking for footnotes. There were none. She assumed it was a typo and set the packet aside.
There was also a map of the city. The east side, where she lived, was marked with dense clusters of apartment buildings. The streets were wide and well-lit, walkways connecting the residential areas to the city center. There was a public bus system, efficient-looking and clearly marked. At the very bottom of the map, near the bottom, was a cluster of small buildings marked as “residential cabins (pending approval).” On the west side of the city was a single large apartment complex, isolated from the main urban center.
That, Celeste realized, must be where the rejected applicants lived.
She put on the bracelet. It fit perfectly around her wrist, settling into place like it had been made for her. The gold bead caught the light.
The apartment had a small kitchen window that looked out over the city. Celeste stood there as the sun began to set, watching the lights flicker on in building after building, and tried not to think about the isolation of the west side. About the distance between here and there. About the fact that the map showed no roads directly connecting the two areas.
She didn’t think about the asterisk.