According to Gizmodo, their sister site io9 is publishing an exclusive short story this month from Lightspeed Magazine. The story, titled “Mother’s Hip,” is by authors Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff. It’s a science-fiction piece set in a future where Amazon runs a “Prime Air Brigade” fighting anarchists in the rainforest. The narrative follows Hynd, a cybernetically enhanced pilot permanently wired into a Lilith-class mothership, who is now a veteran performing as a musician in a bar. The story cuts between her traumatic wartime memories of controlling drone “children” and her fragile present life, dealing with post-cybernetics syndrome.
More than just killer drones
Look, a lot of sci-fi about corporate wars and drone swarms is pretty cold. It’s all about the tech and the explosions. But this story isn’t really about that. The core of “Mother’s Hip” is its brutal, emotional interiority. Here’s the thing: the mothership, Hynd, isn’t a cold AI. She’s a human woman who was desperate and unemployed, who signed up at twenty, and who was then physically fused into a weapons platform. She feels every loss of her drone “children” as a personal, maternal tragedy. The story forces you to sit in her grief, in her longing to hold the machines she’s forced to create and send to die. It’s a devastating metaphor for how corporations can consume human empathy and turn it into a weaponized resource.
amazon-as-the-ultimate-dystopian-employer”>Amazon as the ultimate dystopian employer
So the setting is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Amazon isn’t just a store or a cloud provider here; it’s a full-blown military-industrial complex, waging war to protect its assets (the “lungs of the world,” the rainforest). The story casually mentions a “Basic Income” that’s become a “gilded leash” locking people into squalid boarding houses. The anarchists aren’t cartoon villains—they’re trying to undo Amazon’s control software and “give people their selves back.” It’s a world where signing up for a corporate army seems like the only escape from a dead-end life, only to trade one form of imprisonment for another, more literal one. The body horror of her installation—”her flesh skewered through with data cables”—is just the physical manifestation of the deal she made.
The punk rock heart of it all
And that’s where the “present day” bar scenes hit so hard. The veteran, now going by “Mother’s Hip,” is a shell. She’s emaciated, her data ports are scarred over, and she’s trying to reconnect with a self that existed before Amazon: a trans woman who played bass in a punk band as a teenager. The music is her tether back to humanity. But the bar is full of other cyborgs and augmented people just trying to get by, mostly ignoring her. It’s a painfully quiet portrait of trauma and community on the fringes. The contrast is the whole point. In the sky, she was a god of war, transcendent and powerful. On the ground, she’s just another struggling artist, asking for a glass of cold water because room-temperature stuff reminds her of being poor.
Why this kind of story matters
Basically, this is speculative fiction doing what it does best: taking a current trend and following it to a logical, emotional extreme. We already live with algorithmic management, gig economy desperation, and corporate scale that feels governmental. The story asks what happens when that scale decides it needs a private air force, and what it costs the human beings it enlists to run it. It’s not a action romp. It’s a sad, character-driven piece about the soul in the machine—and who owns it. I think that’s a far more chilling and effective critique than any dystopia filled with mustache-twirling villains.
