Keeper of Titan’s Grid

Joyce Osaka — Keeper of the Grid The methane winds howled across Titan’s frozen plains,

rattling the domes of New Homestead like a warning. Inside, Joyce Osaka bent

over a console, her fingers steady despite the tremors in the power lines. She had grown up

with this sound — the hum of reactors, the groan of cables under strain, the whispered fear

that one outage could mean the end of everything. Her parents had tended hydroponic

gardens in the colony’s early years, coaxing green life from nutrient gels under artificial

light. Joyce, however, found her calling in the machinery

that kept those lights burning. At sixteen, she apprenticed under the chief