Summary of Mother’s Hip by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff

Lightspeed #188, January 2026

A story about war, conditioning, motherhood, and identity told through dual timelines

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The story alternates between two timelines: Hynd as a Lilith-class mothership during the Amazon War, and the same person years later, performing as a musician named Mother’s Hip in a small bar. During the war, Hynd is literally merged with a massive aircraft—her flesh installed in a gun-metal gray tube with data cables and feeding tubes skewered through her body. She has sixty-four wombs that rapidly manufacture combat drones she experiences as her beloved children, each with unique personalities and names like Sheena, Davey, Nicola, and Grant.

Hynd circles high above the Amazon Rainforest, where corporate forces fight anarchists trying to save “the lungs of the world” from destruction by capital. Her heart breaks eighty-one times in a single day as her drone children are shot down. She’s been conditioned to love them intensely—each death feels like losing a real child. She wishes she could hold them to her hip, bounce them until they smiled, talk them out of their suicidal missions. But they’re born to die, attacking anarchist positions with deadly precision.

When the conditioning is stripped away, Hynd doesn’t feel liberated—she feels violated. The love she had for her drone children, whether artificial or not, was the only thing giving her life meaning. In a rage-filled breakdown, she screams “Where are my children?” and opens her bomb bay doors, purging all the drones in a “mass abortion” while targeting both anarchist and Amazon forces indiscriminately. Her uncontrolled bombing kills as many contractors as anarchists and burns another hundred hectares of rainforest before she’s shot down by the “Cloud Punchers.”

In the present timeline, the performer who was once Hynd sits on stage in a flowing black dress, her body emaciated from post-cybernetics syndrome. Her scalp is a patchwork of long black hair and scars from removed data ports. Her silver cybernetic eyes mark her as a veteran. She performs experimental music combining electroacoustic guitar with a noisebox, playing songs with titles like “Stillborn Skyfish,” “On Angel Wings,” “Fault Line on the Moon,” and “Friendly Fires.”

The bar crowd largely ignores her performance—trans lesbians play pool, a glamorous brunette smokes at the bar, the bartender with fire-engine-red cyber-arms cleans glasses while a mecha fighting tournament plays overhead. One woman, Crystal (identified by her dog collar tag), brings Hynd water and smiles at her, but her friends eventually drag her away, possibly disturbed after realizing Hynd is an Amazon veteran.

Through her songs, Hynd processes her trauma. She explains between numbers that she learned to love her children by piloting delivery drones remotely before being selected for the mothership program. She sings about the daughter who took out the anarchist transmitter, about the pride and regret she felt, about friendly fires and the person who showed her hate through a mask of forgiveness—Peta, who thought she was helping by freeing Hynd from conditioning.

After her set, an AR representative from Out of Order (a major label) approaches with a business card, praising her “combat doll dreamfolk” style and offering to help her reach a bigger audience. The woman explains this genre is growing popular with former veterans. But when the agent uses the word “help” in that well-intentioned tone, Hynd’s trauma is triggered. She thinks of how “help” was what they offered when they took her children away, what Amazon told her to get but wouldn’t pay for when they discharged her.

Hynd snaps at the agent to leave her alone, causing a scene in the now-quiet bar. She just wants to make her music in peace. After the agent leaves and the bar noise returns to normal, the bartender silently offers Hynd ice water—a small kindness. She sits at the bar, holding the crumpled business card, uncertain how to feel about it. The story ends with ambiguity about whether she’ll pursue the opportunity or continue performing in obscurity, choosing isolation over the exposure that might bring more unwanted “help” into her already traumatized life.