Aukusti Mikael Heikki

The New Ward

Aukusti Mikael Heikki was born at 09:46 on the morning of 4 April 2020 at the Royal Bixbus Hospital, the first child of Aldo Mattias Heikki and Leena Kristiina Heikki (née Mäkinen). He weighed 3.54 kilograms. He was one of the first children delivered in the hospital's new maternity unit, which had been open for only a few weeks and still smelled of paint, and the staff who delivered him—midwife Klára Váradi, Dr Daniel Harper, and nurse Lia Brennan—were still learning where the supplies had been put.

His father was the only family in the room. Aldo, a construction subcontractor from Oulu, had been working in Bixbus since October 2018, one of the tradesmen brought through to build The Arlington. Leena, an artist and cook from Helsinki, had followed him the following month. Both had come from large, close families, and both understood, in the hours after their son's birth, exactly how far away those families now were.

His name was chosen in two halves. Aukusti, the Finnish form of August, was Leena's choice—a quiet nod to the month of her own birth and to a great-uncle in Savonia whom she had adored as a child. Mikael was Aldo's, taken from his paternal grandfather's brother, a carpenter who had taught Aldo's father to read a set of plans. Neither parent explained the second half of the reasoning to the other until some weeks later.

Two Families on the Far Side

Aukusti was born into a family whose roots lay entirely on Earth, in a world he would know only through stories, photographs, and the occasional recorded message carried through the portal. On his father's side, his grandfather, Kalle Juhani Heikki, a master builder from Oulu, had died on 4 May 2018, almost two years before Aukusti was born. His grandmother, Sari Anneli Heikki (née Koivunen), born on 27 May 1960, remained in Oulu, a retired educator who learned of her first grandchild's birth through a short message that took several days to reach her.

His great-grandmother, Liisa Marjatta Heikki, had died in Oulu in November 2019, while Leena was carrying him. Aldo had been unable to return for her funeral, and the loss sat close to the surface in the months around his son's birth in ways that Leena noticed and Aldo rarely acknowledged.

On his mother's side, his grandfather, Mikko Antero Mäkinen, born on 10 November 1966, was a museum curator in Helsinki, and his grandmother, Helena Johanna Mäkinen (née Lahtinen), born on 5 April 1968, was a language teacher and a collector of Finnish folk tales. Leena's younger siblings, Arttu and Siiri, became an uncle and an aunt to a nephew they had never been able to hold. Of all of them, Siiri was the most persistent correspondent, and the photographs of Aukusti that reached Helsinki came, more often than not, in reply to her letters.

A Child on the Hip

The first year of Aukusti's life coincided with the founding of the Bixbus Event Collective, which his mother had helped to establish only weeks before he was born. The family lived in a two-room unit in one of the prefabricated residential blocks set aside for Killerton's subcontractors, close enough to the building sites that the sound of machinery formed the background of his earliest months. Aldo worked long shifts; Leena worked when she could; and Aukusti spent most of his waking hours on his mother's hip, in a sling, or asleep in a basket beneath a trestle table.

It was not an easy year for any of them. Bixbus had no grandparents to call on, no established circle of mothers, and very little that had been designed with small children in mind. Aukusti was a poor sleeper and a colicky baby, and for several months his parents took turns walking him through the corridors of their block in the small hours. Leena later described that period, in letters to her sister, as the loneliest of her life. Aldo said less about it, but his colleagues noticed that he arrived at work in the mornings looking older than he had the year before.

The bonfire evenings that had sustained his mother through her first months in Bixbus became part of Aukusti's world almost from the beginning. He was carried to the Bixbus Bonfire in his first weeks, wrapped against the evening chill, and heard the words spoken as the fire was lit—Light the fire. Share the light.—long before he could understand them. By the time he could talk, he would say them himself, loudly and slightly too early, whenever anyone struck a match.

The Floor of the Community Centre

By 2021, when Leena took over the day-to-day running of the Collective, Aukusti had become a fixture on the floor of its rooms at the Bixbus Community Centre. He learned to walk between stacks of folding chairs and cable reels, and spent long afternoons building towers from the timber offcuts that Jenna Drake brought over from her workshop. He knocked most of them down himself, with great satisfaction, and rebuilt them almost immediately. The Collective's volunteers took turns keeping an eye on him, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Aldo built him a small wooden workbench before he could walk properly, scaled to a toddler's height and fitted with a vice that did not quite close. It stood first in the corner of the family's unit and later beside his bed, and it became the centre of his play: a place to hammer, saw, glue, and take apart whatever he could lay his hands on. Aldo, who said little in most settings, talked to his son at length across that bench, explaining joints and grain and why some things held and others did not.

Aukusti was a late talker, and when his words came they came in two languages at once. His parents spoke Finnish at home, and everyone else he knew spoke English, and for much of his third year he mixed the two freely within single sentences, to the confusion of the Collective's volunteers and the delight of his mother. The early-learning group he attended from 2022, run by a cooperative of settler parents in a converted storage unit, gently encouraged him to keep the languages apart. He took some time to agree.

He was a cautious child in crowds. At the Founders' Festival in July 2022, separated from his mother for some twenty minutes in the press of people along the main road, he was found sitting very still beside a stall, refusing to speak to the stallholder who had noticed him, and refusing to cry until Leena arrived. For a year afterwards he would only attend large gatherings on his father's shoulders, where he could see everything and be reached by nobody.

Lanterns and Neighbours

The Winter Light Festival was the first of the Collective's events that Aukusti was old enough to take part in rather than simply be carried through. At three he made his first lantern at one of his mother's workshops, a lopsided paper shade on a frame of Jenna Drake's offcuts, and lit it from the festival's single opening flame. He refused to let anyone else carry it. When it burned through an hour later and collapsed into ash, he cried with a grief that outlasted the festival, and made three more the following year, each sturdier than the last.

Lisa Smith, who had founded the Collective with his mother and became Lisa Kendrick on her marriage in 2022, was a constant presence through his early years—at the Community Centre, at the bonfire, and in the noisy kitchen arguments between the two women that Aukusti learned to sleep through. When Lisa's daughter Ivy was born in March 2024, Aukusti, then almost four, was taken to see her and came away disappointed that she could not yet build anything. He tolerated her thereafter with the gravity of an older child obliged to share his toys.

Aldo, who had grown up with a sauna in every house he had ever lived in, built a small one behind their apartment block in 2024 from salvaged timber and a stove brought through the portal. It was barely large enough for three people, and the building's management tolerated it only after Aldo promised not to light it during the hottest months. Aukusti was allowed in for a few minutes at a time, sitting on the lowest bench, and treated each visit as a solemn occasion.

Two Kinds of Making

As he grew, Aukusti divided his attention between his parents' worlds with an energy that occasionally exhausted them both. With Aldo he built: stick houses in the dust outside their block, towers of bricks borrowed from building sites and returned under protest, and, at four, a lopsided birdhouse for a settlement with very few birds. With Leena he cooked, painted, and listened. She told him the stories her mother had collected in Savonia—of forest spirits, lake creatures, and drowned brides—and he asked, every time, whether there were forests like that anywhere in Clivilius.

He was stubborn in the particular way of children who know exactly what they want to make. If a tower fell or a drawing went wrong, he would tear it down or crumple it up and start again from nothing, sometimes four or five times in a row, and would accept no help until he had exhausted every attempt of his own. His parents disagreed, mildly, about how to handle this. Aldo admired the persistence and saw himself in it. Leena worried about the frustration and saw herself in that.

In 2023 the family moved out of the subcontractors' block and into a modest apartment in one of the newer residential developments that Aldo had helped to build. Aukusti, then three, was unsettled by the move for several weeks, and insisted on sleeping with the workbench pushed against his bed. He settled once he had worked out that the apartment's windows looked across at a building site, and that from the right chair he could watch his father's crews at work.

Questions About Helsinki

Aukusti grew up knowing that he had grandparents, an aunt and an uncle, and that they lived somewhere he could not go. The family received occasional recorded messages from Earth, and Aukusti watched them with intense seriousness, often asking for them to be played again. He sent drawings back in return: pictures of his parents, of the Community Centre, of buildings that did not exist yet, and, more than once, of what he imagined his grandmother Helena's flat in Kallio must look like.

The questions he asked about Helsinki and Oulu became harder for his parents to answer as he got older. He wanted to know why his grandparents did not come to visit, why there was snow in his mother's stories and none outside his window, and whether he would one day go to Finland the way other children in his group talked about going back to wherever their families had come from. Aldo tended to answer with facts. Leena tended to answer with stories. Neither answer fully satisfied him.

He formed his closest early friendships among the children of other construction families, who shared his particular understanding of what it meant to have parents who left before dawn in work boots. His best friend from the age of three was Noor Haddad, the daughter of a Lebanese steelworker and a Welsh electrician who had both come through with the Killerton crews. The two of them spent much of 2024 attempting to dig a tunnel beneath the courtyard of their apartment block, and were stopped only when the building's caretaker found the hole.

The city around him was the only world Aukusti knew, and to him it was entirely ordinary that it should be unfinished. Cranes stood over every district he walked through, new towers rose between one month and the next, and the population of the settlement climbed into the millions while he learned to count. He assumed, as children do, that every city was always being built, and was puzzled to learn from his mother that Helsinki had been more or less finished for a very long time.

In 2025, the anxiety and back pain that had troubled his father in Finland returned under the strain of long hours and an ever-expanding workload. Aukusti noticed before his parents said anything, finding Aldo lying flat on the living-room floor in the evenings with his eyes closed. He began bringing his father tools from his workbench—a mallet, a spirit level, a bent screwdriver—and offering to fix his back. Aldo let him try, every time.

First Days at School

Aukusti started school at Bixbus School in 2025, at the age of five, among one of the largest intakes the school had yet received. He went in on his first morning holding his father's hand and refusing his mother's, and came out that afternoon announcing that he intended to be a builder, a cook, and an artist, in no particular order. His teacher, Rosalind Achterberg, noted in her first report that he was quiet in group work, absorbed in anything practical, and inclined to argue with instructions he considered inefficient.

School suited him unevenly. He was quick with numbers and patient with anything he could hold in his hands, but struggled to sit still through stories that were not his mother's and found the noise of a full classroom tiring. He came home most afternoons wanting nothing but an hour at his workbench. Noor was in the same class, which helped. So did the discovery that the school had a small garden where children were allowed to dig.

His parents' working lives remained full. Leena continued to run the Event Collective, and Aldo's crews were rarely without a project in a city that was still growing faster than anyone could keep up with. Aukusti spent many evenings with whichever parent was free, and some with neither, in the care of neighbours or of the Collective's volunteers. He did not complain about this often, but he kept a careful count of the evenings when both of them were home, and announced the total from time to time.

Six

By the middle of 2026, Aukusti was six years old: tall for his age, fair like his father, with his mother's habit of talking with his hands. He spoke Finnish at home and English everywhere else, and had largely stopped mixing them. He had outgrown the workbench Aldo built him as a toddler, and had been given a second, larger one for his sixth birthday, which he immediately began taking apart to see how it had been made.

He still asked about Helsinki. He drew maps of a city he had never seen, assembled from his mother's descriptions and his grandparents' recorded messages, and filled them with buildings of his own invention. His parents, who had stopped trying to answer every question, began instead to tell him what they remembered, and let him make of it what he would.

On the evening of 23 July 2026, Leena took him to the small dusk gathering at the site of the original Bixbus Bonfire, held each year on the anniversary of the settlement's founding. Aukusti stood with the handful of people who still remembered how it had begun, held his mother's hand while the fire was laid, and said the old words a fraction before everyone else, as he always had.