Chapter 3 is prefaced by an Earthseed verse arguing that God is shaped by humanity.

Reacting to the recent death of an astronaut on a mission to Mars, Lauren considers whether humanity might be safer if they eventually left Earth behind and made a new home in space. Political disagreement prevents the astronaut from being buried in space, which was her wish, and Lauren is upset by their inability to honor her chosen resting place.

Lauren discusses the realities of living in the neighborhood. “Fashion,” she notes, now means being plausibly dirty so you don’t look like a target, and the last “window wall” to receive broadcasts has recently gone dark. When it was working, she explains, it ran on “kid power”: children on bikes, rigged to generate electricity while others watched the screen. Now, she explains, everybody just uses radios.

When a neighbor named Mrs. Sims dies by suicide, Lauren’s father and his wife, Cory, find her body. Cory struggles in the aftermath of the death. Sanctimonious, racist, and judgmental, Mrs. Sims had been a polarizing entity. Still, Lauren notes, she was a member of the community, and she had been plagued by numerous family tragedies—much of her family had recently died in a house fire set by arsonists for no discernible reason.

Unsettled, Lauren wonders what the very religious Mrs. Sims’s own beliefs about suicide must have been and whether she thought she’d condemned herself to hell. Lauren begins to gather her divergent thoughts about God on paper, contending that “God is Change.”