Adventitious, February 2026 (Originally published in psychopomp, 2024)
Hob is a weary exorcism specialist leading a crew tasked with clearing the ghost-life from a freshly terraformed planet — a world remade to house refugees from Zetharin, a dying planet whose orbit was catastrophically disrupted by a thaumaturgical experiment. Three weeks into the job, the work has grown slow and grinding, with only the most stubborn alien haunts left to clear along the meridian lines. Hob’s particular problem is a solitary “cabbage-faced motherfucker” (CFM), a toroidal, cabbage-appendaged megafauna whose ghost refuses to accept its own death.
Things grow considerably more complicated when a second ghost appears in the crew’s mess hall: a human man named Ozzi, who cheerfully announces he thinks he’s dead. He is. His small ship crashed during an unsanctioned visit to the system — a mission Hob quickly deduces was run by exo-sympathizers, activists opposed to the wholesale destruction of alien ecosystems that terraforming requires. Company headquarters instructs Hob to treat Ozzi like any other haunt and exorcise him on schedule. Hob, to his own evident discomfort, finds he cannot quite do that.
As his crew moves on and Hob remains behind with Ozzi and the stubborn CFM, the two develop a wary, bantering intimacy. Hob locates the crash site and Ozzi’s physical remains, and spends a long, exhausting day recovering and burying the bodies of Ozzi’s crewmates — his sister and two friends who shared his cause. Through their conversations, the story quietly excavates Hob’s past: he was once a terraformer himself, responsible for wiping out at least one world’s ecosystem. He switched to exorcism, and he and his deputy Jaara share the particular damage of people who’ve heard an entire planet scream.
Hob’s attempts to exorcise the CFM haunt are ingenious and painful to watch — first a fake meal, then a fake mate, and finally a fake offspring whose unreachable cries break through the creature’s limited comprehension. When the CFM finally accepts its death and crosses over, the moment is both triumphant and devastating.
With Ozzi, Hob tries a different approach entirely. He smashes the datasafe recovered from the crashed ship — footage the activists gathered documenting the destruction of alien life — then reveals he’d already copied its contents. Ozzi, enraged and undone, uses the last of his ghostly energy to key in a destination code for the footage before finally crossing over, leaving Hob to press send.
The story ends with Hob fired, locked out of company systems, and waiting in the grass. When Jaara arrives to collect him, they do something reckless and probably futile together: they terraform a small patch of the planet back to its alien state, creating a makeshift preserve around the crash site. It probably won’t last. It might not matter. But Jaara says it does, and it sounds truer from her mouth than his.
Aimee Ogden is an American Nebula- and Eugie Foster Award-nominated speculative fiction writer living in the Netherlands. Her first two novellas, “Local Star” and Nebula Award Finalist “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” debuted in 2021, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Analog, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.