How High We Go in the Dark

The narrator, a world builder, takes her daughter, Nuri, to the seed field where she’s responsible for designing Earth. These seed fields grow advanced civilizations, and the narrator gives Nuri a probability scope to study Earth’s potential. However, Nuri is heartbroken when she realizes that her mother must leave to accompany Earth and monitor its development. She lands on Earth as the ancestor to a starfish, waiting eons for evolution to pass. In the prehistoric oceans, she reflects on having to leave Nuri but knows it was out of her control.

The narrator reincarnates as a Neanderthal and helps early humans learn to survive. However, when their daughter is born, the narrator realizes that her strange genetics caused a mutation that makes her daughter glow. By the time the child is eight, a virus has mutated in her, infecting the whole tribe with an extraterrestrial illness. The narrator leaves when they’ve all died, revealing that the child is Annie from Chapter 1, “30,000 Beneath a Eulogy.” The narrator then lives alone for centuries, punishing herself for having done harm. She eventually reincarnates to help the Sumerians, teaching them advancements such as fishing and irrigation. She misses Nuri and mourns her dead daughter.

She remembers showing Nuri the future of Earth while it was still a seed, and even then was awed by its potential. She reminisces about her own world and its gradual decay as the world seeds are sent out into the universe, leaving its inhabitants to blend in on whatever planet they can. The narrator holds herself accountable for the destruction of Atlantis, having given them too much knowledge at once. Following another failure, she seeks solitude, reflecting on all the things that contribute to a planet’s success. Not all planet seeds flourish, and many planets fail before achieving intelligent life.

The narrator interacts with Galileo and Isaac Newton, guiding their mathematics and ideas to help science. She then travels to the US, joining the suffragist movement before falling in love again. Her family is killed by marauding soldiers during the Civil War, so she travels to Japan. After living two more lives there, she returns to the US, only to be placed in an internment camp during World War II. Her daughter dies in the internment camp, and once she and her husband are released, she leaves him. She thinks often of Nuri and her departure from her home planet, during which she gave Nuri a crystal pendant that matched her own so that they could always navigate toward each other.

After World War II, she was reborn in time to join the hippie movement, then once again as Clara. Her efforts to reverse climate change were rooted in a desire to contain the Artic plague, but she was ultimately unsuccessful. She then was reborn as Theresa, and the narrator begins using “you” as it becomes clear that she’s speaking to Bryan. She tells him of her love for possibility. They’ve been together for 70 years, and Bryan is dying, allowing her to tell him her story and show her true self. She imagines what it’ll be like if Nuri finds her—how she’ll interact with Earth and the people who live on it. She speculates the possibility that Nuri is already on Earth and dreams of finding her.