The following is an excerpt from Information Age by Cora Lewis. She is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared in The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York and previously reported for BuzzFeed News. Cora lives in Brooklyn near Sunset Park.
Information Age follows a young journalist covering tech, politics, and the economy in the late 2010s, where the rapid churn of news shapes both her professional identity and personal life. Told in sharp vignettes and overheard dialogue, the novella blurs the public and the private with wry observation and emotional precision. At once sly, spare, and tender, Information Age captures the splendor and unease of being alive in an always-online world. The debut is available now from Joyland Editions.
Biosphere 3
At last an email hits — a former professor in need of a research assistant.
For an hourly fee, I agree to prowl Lexus and JSTOR, compile clippings, fact-check and proof-read. The pay will get me through the month.
Saul and I keep on meeting up for meals, now that I can account for myself again. “You gotta eat,” he texts. He cooks, or I do, or we get falafel, grape leaves, and baba ganoush from down the street. Other days, roast chicken, plantains, rice and beans.
One night, Saul asks about the work I’m doing for the professor, and I tell him she’s revisiting an event from the 90s — the “Biosphere Two” experiment — for its prescience. The sphere (really a set of geodesic domes, I say) housed four men, four women, and over 3,000 species in a controlled environment in the desert of Oracle, Arizona. “Then a lot of things went wrong.”
“What was Biosphere One?” he says.
“Earth,” I say. “So far, so good.”
“So far, so-so,” he counters.
Back home, nourished, I read a last article before bed.
“While construction took place on the Biosphere, its future inhabitants performed skits and songs for one another,” the piece reads. “While getting to know one another, they called themselves, ‘The Theater of All Possibilities.’”
I copy-paste the phrase to my ever-growing doc and turn out the light.
*
The next morning I fire up my laptop to watch old YouTube videos over breakfast. (“Scraping media,” it’s called.) I’m gung ho, committing to the work.
Coffee, cereal. A banana. Showers. Leon and Susannah head to their respective office and cafe.
When “Biosphere Two” launched, its founder predicted a century’s worth of rotating crews, whose isolation “would reveal as much about the planet’s systems and their limits as the first trip to the moon,” I read.
The experiment’s team included: a biologist, an agriculturist, a doctor, and an engineer. With no operating manual from which to work, the team adopted the mantra, “When you’re building a new world, you have all the problems of the world to solve.”
When the Biosphere crew members first crossed the threshold into the bubble in the 90s, each Biospherian had something to say at the press junket.
“I take my final breaths of this atmosphere knowing I’ll take breaths from a different atmosphere for years to come,” one said.
“I take this step to be one step closer to immortality for the human race,” said another.
“Here goes nothing,” said a third, whom I considered the darling of the international reports.
*
My research holds me, as the months pass in the Sphere and the days pass in the world, and I learn about the fragile conditions that broke down one by one.
For instance: Just weeks into the expedition, several crew members’ skin turned orange. It turned out they had been eating too many sweet potatoes, rich in beta carotene. Next, a water salinity error led to an algae overbloom, which turned waters in one of the Biosphere’s ecosystems acid green. These hiccups were quickly made right.
To keep carbon emissions down, the crew was forbidden to make fires.
No candles, I note. No birthdays.
Towards the mission’s end, when things turned dangerous, the crew lowered the temperature in the sphere to breathe more slowly, to conserve oxygen. During those weeks, they sometimes played a yule log video on a small screen.
“When we sat next to it, we felt warmer,” one crew member recalled.
*
As I’m typing at our kitchen table one night, the buzzer sounds — delivery. I get the door and divvy up containers — dumplings, scallion pancakes, noodles, edamame — then return to my work with my share.
“I’m officially worried about you,” Susannah says, retrieving a seltzer from the fridge. “Bio-girl.”
On my screen, on YouTube, inside the Biosphere, plants and trees have begun dying in high numbers. The project’s desert’s turned to shrubland. Certain pests, introduced without predators, are multiplying at distressing rates.
“I know,” I say. “I’m almost done, though. Just a few more weeks.”
“What’s the latest?” she says.
“The bee population is faltering, making pollination work for humans,” I say.
“Awfully close to home.”
The next morning, an email arrives from the professor asking if we might Zoom to talk through “a few questions.” Her tone’s hard to place, and I soon learn why — a production company’s approached her about turning the manuscript of her as-yet-unpublished book into a screenplay. She wonders if I’d read the studio’s initial draft, which they inherited from “similar IP.” She says it has four authors. I’d be happy to. She’ll send it my way.
That day, I focus on the case of the missing oxygen. Months into their expedition, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide increased in the sphere at rapid rates, thinning the air inside the dome. Somehow, more than seven tons of O2 vanished, creating an atmosphere comparable to life at 15,000-foot elevation. The crew members woke up gasping for breath.
The claustrophobia of the project closing in on me, I go for a run. When I get out of the shower, after, I see Saul’s texted. I’d passed him, unseeing, while sweating along the water.
“was that you just now in a blur by the river?”
It was. He invites me over, and I head there as night falls.
At Saul’s, as he fries two pork chops in a skillet, he asks — hesitantly — about the project.
“Still… consuming?” he says, rummaging for applesauce and horseradish and mustard.
“I think it’s good for me,” I say. “New sources.”
As we sit down to eat, I explain about the oxygen: As it turned out, the concrete and steel base of the Biosphere structure absorbed CO2 at higher rates than expected, thanks to an El Niño effect. This, in turn, caused the plants to produce less O2 than predicted.
“It was an early climate change result,” I say. “It doomed them.”
“Did they ever try again?” he says.
“There has yet to be another mission.”
“Yikes,” says Saul, pulling a face, getting up to fix us drinks. “Though on the bright side, that means your end’s in sight.”
*
“It’s just one set of data,” the hero says now, his voice “near breaking,” his hair “foxy gray.”
I’m absorbing the “BIOME: ATTACK!” script in one sitting, thanks to its highly processed quality. It’s a thriller in which a billionaire “environmentalist” funds the Biosphere as a cynical prototype for an eventual planned escape from Earth – an intergalactic lifeboat come the apocalypse.
“It’s time,” the heroine says. “Planetary oxygen levels are low. Hazardously low, and dropping.”
The knowledge dawns, the Courier typeface reads, or maybe she’d always known from the start. It was never about Biosphere Two. It was always rehearsal for this – the planetary getaway car.
I crunch a mouthful of goldfish and chase it with a glug of ginger ale.
On the page, the heroine raises the volume of a radio transmission.
“Officials confirm that global O2 levels can no longer support life as we know it,” the broadcaster says. “All citizens are encouraged to report to their local emergency biomes.”
The protagonist closes his eyes and nods. A camera pans to monitors around the couple inside a spacelock. On the screens, jumpsuited men and women tend plants and animals, perform lab work, cook and spin wool in different futuristic rooms.
The character punches a set of numbers into a keypad, sealing the airlock around them, and initiates a launch protocol.
As the rocket fires out of the desert against the glory of the blue Catalina mountains, I read, an observer on the ground can just make out the words printed on the spaceship’s side, as it blasts into the unknown beyond: BIOSPHERE 3.
“Timely!” I email the professor, to let her know I’m digesting it. I promise further notes.
Now I’m sitting on the steps to Saul’s building. He sits a few steps away.
It’s my turn to talk about my day, because Saul had a patient die that afternoon in his care, after 12 hours of monitoring vitals, administering fluids. He’d comforted the patient’s son, a man older than his parents, holding him up in inexperienced arms when he’d collapsed.
“I’ve been reading about the first man who lived in a closed system,” I say, trying to distract. “In the 1800s. He gave some advice to those who’d try after him.”
“Floss,” says Saul.
“Guess again.”
“Semper ubi sub ubi.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s Latin.”
“What’s it Latin for?”
Saul’s a little drunk. He’s uncertain how this will play.
“‘Always wear under-wear,’” he says.
I reach up to punch his shoulder in slow-motion, and he lets me knock him over. When I pull him back upright, he holds onto my hand.
“What did he say,” Saul says. “The guy.”
“He said to always remember that ‘man is the most unstable element in any system.’”
“Ah,” Saul says. “But had he heard about woman.”
I steady my friend’s shoulders and take my hand back gently, needing sleep, needing to finish the job for the paycheck. I walk Saul up the stairs to his apartment, take off his shoes, and lie him down on his couch. I walk myself home.
Excerpted from Information Age. Published with permission from Joyland Editions. Copyright © 2025 by Cora Lewis.