The Cartographer
The cursor blinked over Buenos Aires.
Elara Voss stared at the empty space where twelve million people had lived. Her coffee had gone cold an hour ago. The night shift in the Cartography Division meant working alone, which she preferred. Fewer questions. Fewer looks of pity when colleagues saw what city came up next in the queue.
She typed the command: REMOVE DESIGNATION.
The system prompted her for confirmation. Standard procedure. Someone in the early days had built in a pause, a moment of human hesitation before a city disappeared from the official record. Elara appreciated that anonymous programmer. They understood.
CONFIRM REMOVAL: BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA. POPULATION PRE-INVASION: 12,400,000. CURRENT STATUS: UNINHABITABLE.
She confirmed.
The name vanished. In its place, a gray zone appeared, marked only by coordinates and a contamination classification code. CC-7: no human habitation permitted for minimum fifty years. The Vethrak had done something to the ground there, something that made the soil reject life.
Five years since the invasion. Five years of updates, removals, additions. New settlements sprouting in unlikely places. Old cities reduced to coordinate markers and warning labels.
Elara pulled up the next entry in her queue. Her hand froze over the keyboard.
PORTLAND, OREGON. POPULATION PRE-INVASION: 2,100,000. CURRENT STATUS: UNINHABITABLE.
Home.
She had known this day would come. The queue worked alphabetically by region, and she had watched it creep closer for months. Oceania. South America. Now North America, Pacific Northwest subdivision. She could have requested a transfer, asked someone else to process it. The division had protocols for emotional conflicts.
She stayed in her chair.
The satellite imagery loaded slowly, resolution improving in stages. First the coastline, familiar despite the changes. Then the river, wider now where dams had failed. Finally the city itself, or what remained.
The grid pattern was still visible, streets carved through rubble and char. Forest Hill, where she had grown up, was a crater. The bridge her father had helped engineer lay twisted in the Willamette, steel bones reaching toward a sky that had burned.
Elara zoomed in on the residential sector. Block by block, she searched for the house with the blue door, the one her mother had painted every spring because the rain wore it down to gray.
Nothing. The block did not exist. In its place, a secondary impact zone, the Vethrak’s surgical removal of resistance pockets.
She pulled up the historical overlay, pre-invasion imagery captured by a tourism satellite. There. The blue door. The maple tree in the front yard. The garden her mother had cultivated for thirty years.
REMOVE DESIGNATION.
The prompt waited. Elara’s finger hovered over the confirmation key.
Cartography was supposed to be objective. Maps recorded reality, not sentiment. The division’s mandate was clear: update the atlas to reflect current conditions, maintain accuracy for navigation and resource allocation, support reconstruction planning. Emotions had no place in grid coordinates.
The old maps still existed, archived in a database no one accessed. Tourist guides to cities of the dead. Restaurant recommendations for restaurants that were ash. Historical curiosities, preserved but irrelevant.
Elara’s job was to make the new map. The true map. The one that showed humanity where it could actually go.
She thought about the settlers who would read her work. Families choosing new homes, scanning atlas entries for viable destinations. They needed accuracy. They needed to know which routes were safe, which regions could support life, which former cities now posed nothing but hazard.
They did not need to know about blue doors and maple trees.
CONFIRM REMOVAL: PORTLAND, OREGON. POPULATION PRE-INVASION: 2,100,000. CURRENT STATUS: UNINHABITABLE.
She confirmed.
The name disappeared. Another gray zone, another coordinate set, another contamination code. CC-5: limited access with radiation protection. Better than Buenos Aires. Worse than Seattle, which at least had survivors rebuilding in the eastern districts.
Elara reached for her coffee, remembered it was cold, drank it anyway. Bitter.
The queue advanced. Reno. Sacramento. San Diego. San Francisco.
She processed them one by one. Each city a population figure. Each population figure a collection of stories she would never know. The map did not care about stories. The map cared about where roads could be built, where water could be found, where the next generation might grow food.
At 0300, she took her break in the observation lounge. The station orbited at the edge of the debris field, close enough to see Earth through the porthole. The planet looked peaceful from here. Green and blue and white, the colors everyone remembered. You had to know where to look to see the scars, the brown patches where forests had burned, the gray zones where cities had died.
From orbit, it almost looked the same.
Elara pressed her palm against the cold glass. Somewhere down there, beneath clouds and atmosphere and five years of silence, a maple tree might still be growing. Roots reaching through rubble. Leaves unfurling toward a sun that rose the same as it always had.
The maps would never show it. The maps showed what humans could use, where humans could go, what humans could build. The maps were for the living.
She returned to her station at 0315. The queue waited, patient and endless. Stockton. Tacoma. Tijuana.
Elara typed the commands. Confirmed the removals. Added the gray zones and the contamination codes. The atlas shrank and grew simultaneously: fewer cities, more settlements. Fewer roads, more radiation zones. Fewer people, more space.
By 0600, she had processed forty-seven entries. The North American section was nearly complete. Tomorrow, someone on the day shift would handle the final entries. Or the next day. The queue never emptied.
She logged out and stood, stretching muscles stiff from hours of sitting. The porthole caught her eye again. Earth, half-lit by the rising sun, golden light spilling across the Pacific.
Portland faced the other way, still in darkness. She could not see it. She would never see it again, not the city she remembered. That city existed only in archived databases and the unreliable storage of human memory.
The new map showed something else. Coordinates. Contamination codes. A gray zone where twelve million people had lived their lives.
Elara gathered her things and walked toward the crew quarters. Behind her, the atlas waited for the next cartographer, the next city, the next confirmation.
The map always told the truth. That was the cruelest thing about it.
Author’s Note: Five years after the invasion, the bureaucracy of survival grinds on. Someone has to update the maps. Someone has to confirm what was lost. Elara Voss is one of thousands of administrators, technicians, and clerks who keep humanity’s infrastructure running, even when that work means erasing the places they loved.
If you enjoyed this story, you can follow the main story arc in The Exodus Rush, the first book in The Vethrak Requiem series.