Starlight and Lunar Strands

The distinct smell of wood, real, near mythical made-from-a-tree wood, doesn't welcome Selene with a hug when she enters the shop. It bombards her, instead, like a strange olfactory version of a battering ram.

Quartz’ Antiques is known to be the best, most peculiar of shops down Neopra’s main street. Interesting enough to garner the right amount of attention, boring enough to direct further investigation away.

The store is lined with knick knacks from days long past and people long gone. Now, their stories are told through the inevitability of the human need to keep and store old possessions.

“Anything interesting, Q?” Selene says, rapping her knuckles into the glass countertop, tap-tap-taps quiet and fading.

Quartz tosses a necklace at her, eyes hazy as she scrolls through her socials.

Selene catches the necklace, barely, but still, and inspects it.

She snorts.

“A "heart" necklace?” She says incredulously, turning to Quartz whose eyes refocus back to Selene.

“A "heart" locket but cool, huh?” Quartz says with a small grin, canine nicking their bottom lip.

On her hand sits a pendant, a locket, shaped like a heart that no one but a three year old would actually call a heart. It's simple, two curves at the top falling to point at the bottom. Selene has a brief thought to Neopra's planet mandated biology lessons that she, along with every eight year old on this side of the galaxy, had to sit through. Selene can still see in her mind's eye her old teacher's frantic arm movements as he crossed out the shape of a fictitious "heart."

“More like stupid,” Selene says, shaking her head, “I can’t believe people really made stuff like this.”

Quartz hums, flicking a lazy hand before their eyes turn hazy again, lost in the ether.

“Nice chat,” Selene mumbles, pocketing the locket. That’s another chore done. Get something interesting, cool, and quirky enough to post on her socials to show that she’s alive and still relevant.

And it’s fun! Truly, it is. There’s an art in loving oneself, in finding art in one’s own soul. Life should be celebrated, and socials let that happen. Yes.

But sometimes, it was exhausting. No, not that. Even worse, much, much worse.

It was boring.

Everything planned out to their ends, details ironed and flattened to gleaming perfection. Optimized. Parts of the software.

Selene’s part was to be beautiful. To be interesting. Distracting. Hers was the throne of desperation, of pleas and praise, of why can’t I be her? why not me?

It can’t be them because it’s not optimal. It can’t be them because the system does not agree. People, Selene thinks, ask hopeful questions in times of devastation.

Still, she can’t complain. She is aloft despite it all. Despite the forgotten drives home, the blending of the days, the numbing to the cold.

She is aloft. She can still feel.

And she feels something. Like she’s only waiting for something more to arrive. Like she’s on the edge, at the very precipice of something big. The knife almost cutting skin, the fruit almost spoiling rotten.

Just a sliver of a breath away.

It already tastes bitter on her tongue, sour just like hope.

Selene makes the trek back to her house, her walking shoes helping her reach base a touch faster. She’s wary of the glances that stick to her back as she passes but they lessen the closer she gets to her home, pods of houses gleaming brighter and brighter the further down the road.

She knocks her front door open, stops at the threshold as she sees Pixie with her shockingly blue head of hair on a mini-elevator, affixing something to her ceiling.

"Pix?" Selene calls.

"Get us some tea, I'll only be a minute!"

Selene does as she's told, and it isn't long before Pixie joins her. They chat for minutes, almost meaningfully.

Looking up, Selene spots the Satellites Pixie was fiddling with earlier. She turns to Pixie, "Looked at my security?"

Pixie takes a sip of her tea before answering. "Yes, and, as I said before, no breach," she says, rolling her eyes.

A moment of quiet and Selene can already hear the words Pixie’s going to say before her mouth even opens.

"Look, Sel, I promise, no one's just randomly watching you here. Who would want to watch you fake a workout for the views every morning anyway?"

After Pixie leaves, Selene finds herself in her bedroom, exhausted. Numbly, she pats down her pockets, drops the locket on a teacup saucer decorating the top of her desk, the locket’s metal hitting the saucer’s matte white exterior with a clink!

Well, it looks like a teacup saucer, anyway. It was another useless knick knack from Quartz’, some old Earth junk that’s probably less old Earth and more of a Northern Neopra replica.

Selene huffs as she sits on her bed, fingers mindlessly thumbing the cooling duvet. Real or not real? It doesn’t matter. As long as the people on her socials believe, and as long as she stays functioning and productive, she is aloft.

She falls asleep like that, with the starlight outside her windows barely dim with faded green.

~

When Selene wakes, the sky is a dark purple, waves inking into black.

It takes her a second to fully wake up, and another to locate the reason why she was awake in the middle of stardown in the first place.

She sees the light first, just on top of her desk, a small white gleam reflected by the mirror on the wall above it. Then, she hears the sound. The voice.

Something, someone, was talking through the heart locket. From the heart locket?

There was a strange quality to the sound, muffled and colored grey. It was unlike how voices travel through her comms: crystal clear but still so knowingly far away.

This voice felt close, the echo of it rippling through her.

Selene approaches the necklace cautiously, unsure of what else to do. It takes a moment of quick breaths on her part and a few intensifying blinks of the locket before the voice returns but clearer now.

Never one to be patient, Selene tap-tap-taps on her leg before decidedly slapping it, a bad habit she has never outgrown. She grabs the locket hurriedly.

She flicks it open to see... a face. A person with white, white hair, drifting everywhere, in all directions, all at once. It was pried away by the air itself until it flowed into the sky.

Another sound from the… person? (Human?) startles Selene into reality and out of endless paths of lunar strands.

“Uhm," she says, completely ineloquently.

The person inside the locket – on the other side of the locket? Neopra itself!– laughs, breathlessly, disbelievingly. They say something, sounds that become words that become sentences. Unfortunately, all of them lost to Selene.

The person speaks a language Selene has never heard before. And it would have been interesting enough to turn her life on a normal day but the person blinks, blue eyes coming into focus and she is stopped once more.

Strange, is what she thinks.

She’s never seen a person who looked like this before, never mind this technology so old and still, impossibly, functional.

This person, this technology, this entire occurrence, is, quite literally, out of this freakin planet.

And the familiar feeling comes again but this time stronger. Angrier. Gnawing at her skin and leaving dead indents of goosebumps behind. It titters and miraculously, unbelievingly –

It falls.

An exhale. A teardrop. A landing.

Gone is the feeling of something approaching, of waiting, of yearning.

Instead, it is here.

~

At first, she tries to ask questions. She’s curious, she’s been waiting. She’s been bored out of her mind.

After nearly screaming her larynx out with question after question shot at the locket, the thrill of discovery was quickly washed away by the realization that the wide communication barrier between Selene and her new… person was near impossible to overcome.

Near, being the operative word.

They find ground when, as a last ditch effort, they resort to one of the simplest forms of human (?) communication: pointing at stuff and either smiling or frowning to indicate whether it is a good-thing or a bad-thing.

Mercy to Selene's larynx because it worked.

A starday, a whirlwind of it, true, but a starday just like the rest was all it took. The same 27 hours existing now, recorded by humans since the settlement in Neopra some hundred years ago and still.

How different it was viewed through someone else's eyes. Someone else's life.

Someone else's world. Laya's world, as revealed by the repeated shout of the name and self pointing the locket-person – Laya – did earlier.

Earth, completely different from what Neopra has been told since its inception, is alive and well. And, peeking from the tiny locket screen, it remained beautiful.

Maybe it was her fault for being ignorant. Blatantly indifferent to the murmurs on the streets, talk of lies, lies, lies on the lips of the 500 million souls living on this planet.

One all thought housed the last of humanity.

~

In this reincarnation, no one ever speaks directly. Instead, everything is veiled under the guise of perfection.

An endless play.

A ploy: who is living better than who?

who?

~

The walk uphill to her house flashes in a second, thigh pain incomparable to the giddiness bubbling in Selene's gut at the thought of another adventure into old Earth. Or Earth, as it is and as it has changed.

When she finally, finally reaches her bedroom after the bland hours she took taking pictures of her face by some faux roses bush, she feels like she could vibrate out of her body.

Her hand reaches toward the saucer, right for the heart locket but all it touches is empty air.

And everything stills.

The suspicion, long coiling in her gut, at the back of her mind, burns.

The locket is gone, her connection to Earth is gone, and she knows. She knows Neopra was here.

Her mind is quiet and still. It comes slowly, that peculiar feeling. This time, Selene welcomes it with arms spread open. The sleek glass of panels accepting the warmth of the star. Because she recognizes it now not as a cliff’s edge, nor a blade waiting to cut but a beacon.

A call. An adventure.

She runs, the silky soles of her home slippers tearing under the assault of crafted planet soft-roads. She runs uncaringly, heeding a call. For so long, she has wanted to burst out of her skin, stuck in a haze of time wasted away, stagnant and rooted in the wrong kind of dirt.

The shop’s bells tinkle as the doors open to let her in.

“Hi, we’re just about to close!” Quartz voice rings, much like the bells.

“Hi!” Selene shouts back, panting slightly from her run. “It’s me, Selene!” She continues, fixing her homegown where it has splayed opened by her knees.

Quartz comes out from the backroom, embroidered towel in hand, and languidly leans over the glass counters to where Selene is crouched, inspecting her shoes.

“Any reason you’re here a tick away from closing time?”

Selene looks up at that and breathes. Stalling is for cowards. Bad news is bad news even when delivered late. She has to hope. Has to. Has to give her all in this if she wants it, whatever it is, to work.

In the end, it seems a lot like a feeling. Just one, nameless and obscure and free-falling. Tasting like a freedom – an adventure that’s already so, so close.

“The locket,” she says finally, thoughts piling on in her head, split seconds apart from one another. “The one you gave me a couple of days ago…,” she says, hesitating.

“Yes?” Quartz asks, eyebrow lifted in bemusement.

“Is there another one?” Selene asks, quietly. Because she can hope. Because she saw that there was a missing piece to the locket, imperceptible to a passing glance but blatant in her near-hundred inspections.

There had to be another piece. She doesn’t know if it will reach them, Laya, or another Earthling entirely but that doesn’t matter. Not at all.

Selene revels in the peace that blankets her in that slip of a moment. The sweet, sugary taste of hope in the calm before the storm. It doesn’t matter who answers, just that someone will.

Out there. Someone is out there.

Quartz looks at her for a second longer before she turns and pulls a drawer. “Get out of here,” she says, handing over a familiar blue-green locket, curves contoured to form a heart. “I don’t want to know.”

Selene walks out of the shop and finds her way home in what seems like a second.

She drops the locket on the teacup saucer and calls Pixie. Whispered words like help and old-tech and please spilling out of her mouth in an avalanche of longing.

Two days later, she wakes up to starlight glowing around her room and to a noise emanating from the heart locket

It could sound a lot like hello.

~~~~