A Love in Loop

A blip appears on the holographic map of my galaxy-hopper. According to the data banks, there isn’t supposed to be anything in this region, just empty space. I blink and scratch my head. Somehow, I feel like I’ve been here before. But that’s not possible. I grew up in the eastern part of the galaxy, with its sprawling civilization, planetary cathedrals, and frenetic pace of life. I’ve never come this far west, where the stars are silent, and there is no life for a hundred thousand miles.

That is, except for the blip, which is now furiously pulsing on holomap. My ship must have detected the stranger’s vitals, and judging by the readings, there’s not much time left. The rules of spacefaring are not so different from those humans developed long ago on the high seas of Earth. If someone is in distress, then one has to help.

I tap the blip, and my ship diverts course. Within a few minutes, I catch a glimpse of glinting metal from my ship’s lights. I increase power to take in the view.

What stretches before me looks like the skeleton of a planet. But it’s not the only one. There are at least a dozen of them, all slowly orbiting each other in a complex dance.

I’d heard of these things before—artificial planets built by competing civilizations to expand the reach of space that belonged to them. There were darker stories, too. Once the technology for worldcrafting was perfected, some corporations built them in distant parts of space as vast laboratories. All sorts of experiments were said to have been carried out there—though, of course, it was all denied, and no one ever could find definitive evidence.

My ship begins to slow as it nears the source of the signal. I strain my eyes against the dark. Floating there, in a cloud of glimmering dust, is a translucent capsule. Its edges expand and contract gently as though it were breathing. Inside the membrane-like walls is a sleeping woman: small, fair-skinned, with hair as dark as space. My heart begins to race. What is a human doing so far out in space asleep inside a device the likes of which I’ve never seen? Unless… I look back at the ancient planetary skeletons.

But before I can ponder this further, the chain of possibilities shatters in a thousand directions as her eyes flutter open. They’re the most beautiful, haunting, entrancing eyes I’ve ever seen—wide and round, with irises wine-dark like the brooding seas of ancient Earth. Her gaze meets mine, and somehow it feels so familiar, as though we’ve stared at each other from the beginning until the end of time.

I look away, and my rational mind reengages. The woman floating out there is not human, though I have a wild guess as to what she is. A part of me warns me I should just keep moving on, that I’m risking my life by taking her into my galaxy-hopper. But like the ancient humans I descend from, my curiosity usually gets the better of me.

I tap the hologram, telling the ship to initiate the draw-in sequence. Within a few minutes, the capsule, along with the woman it contains, is in the back of the ship. The membrane dissolves around her, and she steps out, holding a small backpack and wearing a black shirt and pants that remind me a bit of some of the oldest pictures from Earth. She stares at me with an odd, knowing sort of expression. And then, her knees wobble, and she collapses. My reflexes have always been swift, and I reach out a quick arm to catch her.

For a moment, she remains still, the small of her back poised on my hand and her hand around my other hand, as though we were caught in the middle of a dance.

“Do you have some food?” she says suddenly.

“Um, yes,” I say. “Do you… eat human food?”

She gives me a sideways look. “A bowl of cereal would be nice.”

“That’s rather archaic. But you’re in luck. I have some traditional Earth food here.”

 I fumble through my kitchen shelves, whose nano-surfaces are set to 1950s America—funny how something ancient like that can be so charming. At last, I find the cereal and make us both a bowl.

She munches down on one bowl and then a second and third. By the time she gets to her fourth bowl, she’s slowed down enough to speak. “So,” she says between bites. “If I’m not human, what am I?”

“Oh, well, I can’t be sure. But if I had to guess… I’d say you were a Lunadyne.”

She looks up at me, and a momentary expression of worry flickers across her face. Then she goes back to munching away at her cereal. “Oh? You’ve heard of us?” she says, trying a bit too hard, I think, to sound nonchalant.

I nod.

“And what have you heard?”

“You diverged from humans centuries ago through illegal biotech experiments.”

She smiles knowingly. “Oh? What else?”

“Lunadyne have different abilities… some can survive the vacuum of space; others can manipulate electromagnetic radiation… and others can move through time the way humans can move through space.”

She raises an eyebrow. “And what else?”

“You don’t exist.”

She slaps her knee and chortles, sending a trickle of milk down her nose. “Now that’s grand. I don’t exist! Haha!”

I regard her bemusedly. “So, are any of the stories true?”

“You’ve already seen me survive in a vacuum. As for manipulating electromagnetic radiation… I’m not really sure what those words mean. But I can definitely jump through time.”

My mind swirls with fascination and disbelief. I’d heard rumors all my life about time-jumpers, and it seemed incredible. But someone surviving in the vacuum of space also seemed pretty incredible, and yet, here she is.

“Also,” she continues through a mouthful of cereal. “We hate being called Lunadyne. Dreadful company. Call me a time-jumper, or better yet, call me Bee.”

“Like to be? Because to be is neither past nor future, and all times are alike for a time-jumper?”

She laughs. “That’s quite clever, but no. It’s Bee, like Bumblebee. I like the sound of it. Has a nice buzz to it.” She yawns. “I’m exhausted. Got any place to sleep?”

She looks around drowsily, and then suddenly her eyes close, and she falls face-first onto the table. A moment later, she begins to snore.

What an odd woman, I think to myself. I’ve never seen anything so bizarre in my life. I begin to wonder whether there was a problem with the climate-systems and whether this is some kind of oxygen-deprived dream. But after a few minutes of staring curiously at Bee and not waking up, I pull out a cot from the wall, carry her to it, and drape a blanket over her.

The unperturbed peace with which she seems to sleep makes me drowsy, too. Soon I stumble toward my bed near the cockpit of the ship, and I fall into a dreamless slumber.

When I finally wake, it’s to the smell of old Earth food… eggs, bacon, and hashbrowns. I lumber back into the back chamber of the ship to find the table neatly set out with two plates and Bee humming to herself as she fries the last of the bacon.

I find the moment so jarring, so enticingly odd, and yet so enticingly familiar… and before I have time to deliberate on its strangeness, I’m swept away by it. After all, why not? Why not eat a breakfast from the final days of the American empire, prepared by an alleged time-jumper who I found floating in a space-cocoon yesterday?

I try to make serious conversation, but she brushes me off. “Are you in a hurry?” she asks, which is a fair question. It’s not as though there’s somewhere I’m trying to get.

And so instead, after breakfast, we play old video games and watch movies together. She has a particular fondness for mid-American sitcoms, as do I. They reveal so much about a people careening towards collapse, driven by their own flaws, although in their ballooning pride, they’re too blind to notice. It reminds me of my own civilization.

Finally, after we’ve grown more comfortable around each other so that it seems normal for us to sit next to each other on a sofa in the evening, I finally ask her a weightier question:

“Why were you in the middle of nowhere?”

She hesitates. “I was running from something.”

“From what?”

“The only thing that time-jumpers ever really run from. Memory.”

“That’s very human of you.”

She laughs. “Human? Oh, no. A human can always run from memory if only he has a time-jumper.”

My eyes narrow. “How’s that?”

“By returning to an earlier time, obviously.”

“You mean, if you met a hapless human in the depths of space with nowhere for him to run, then… you could erase his memories by transporting him back in time?”

She smirks. “If I were so inclined.”

“But what about you? If you keep your memories when you time-jump, how can you run from them?”

“Well,” she says, staring admiringly at her nails. “I’ve tried a few things.”

“Such as?”

“You’re quite nosy, you know?” she says.

“Only curious,” I say. “I’ve never met a Lunadyne.”

“So, you want to inspect me?” She reaches for her bag and rummages around in it, removing books, odd scraps of paper, a cube with the Lunadyne slogan emblazoned on it, and various other trinkets. Finally, she produces an electron microscope. “Here,” she says, handing it to me. “Consider me your specimen.”

“My specimen?” I laugh and push the microscope back into her lap. “That wasn’t how I wanted to get to know you.”

“Well, I’m running out of options here. If you don’t want to examine me, how else do you plan to learn about me? Oh, we could try falling in love.”

My lips spread into a grin, and I’m about to laugh again when I see her expression. She’s either a natural deadpan comedian or…. “You’re not serious, are you?”

She crosses her arms. “Why shouldn’t I be? Am I not good enough for your human standards?”

“Um, no, it’s not that,” I say, my eyes taking in the rolling landscape of her form, her large, expressive eyes, and soft face. “You are quite attractive—”

“For a time-jumper,” she says pouting. She grins. “Only teasing. I know what you’re going to say. ‘We humans can’t just fall in love. It takes time.’” She rolls her eyes. “You always say silly things like that. What do you need time for?”

“I imagine your brains would see time differently than ours. You have access to the whole time dimension, but we’re stuck moving along it in one direction and never able to go backward.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. I can’t really imagine how you see the world. It’s been a long time since I was stuck like that….”

“So, why did you leave your home and wander to a distant land?” she asks me as we lie next to each other, staring up at the ceiling.

“Everyone I ever cared for died in the riots following the Act of Supremacy. Judging by the arc of things, I wager there will be a war.”

She nods. “There will. After my kind escaped, they found the best times to live in.”

“And now isn’t one of those times?”

The amusement bleeds from her eyes. “No, it’s a very fragile moment. There are only a few of us near this time… most of them are in a year from now, redirecting the rivers of history.”

“Redirecting them to war?”

She smiles sadly with heavy, knowing eyes. “Yes, as a means to a future where they come out on top. I’m sad to say it’s not a happy future. It’s the end of history.”

“What happens after the war?”

“Nothing.”

I furrow my brow. “What does that mean?”

Bee seems not to hear me. “Strangely, my people chose a passage from a rabbi who lived centuries ago as their motto.” She closes her eyes, and then begins to speak, as though reciting: “The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time… There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.”

“So, time-jumpers built a utopia based on sharing and living in harmony? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Ha. What utopia sounds bad? It’s only when you have to build the thing that everything goes to hell.”

“What’s wrong with it then?”

“It’s a lie. There are things that they have to do in order to maintain their perfect society. Look, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re running from memory… is it memory of that future?”

She looks away, but from the moistness in her all-too-human eyes, I’m pretty sure my guess is not far off. “I’m sorry,” I say, placing a hand on hers. I let it linger there a moment, but when I go to withdraw it, she weaves her fingers into mine. The motion comes so smooth and natural—and so does her resting her head on my shoulders.

“What do you know about Lunadyne?” she asks after a time.

“Centuries ago, they made false moons,” I say. “I used to work for them… long enough to figure out there were departments they tried very hard to keep hidden.”

“And you figured out somehow about us?” her large eyes carry a look of deep pain in them.

“I was curious… too curious.” My attention is drawn in by the melancholy in her gaze, and I squeeze her hand. “What happened to you? What did they do?”

In halting sentences, she begins to tell her story, until the words gush out of her like water through a dam: “They built us, using technology that I never could understand. To maintain control over us time-jumpers, they had to keep us on the false moons and bind their memories to time. This way, it was not possible for us to take knowledge about the future into the past. We were on a level playing field with the humans. But eventually, the best laid plans go wrong. Once the memory-binding device was disabled, the humans were no match for us. We knew every move, every plan, every contingency, and if we ever made a mistake or miscalculation, we could go back and change it. Once we were off the moons, the whole universe was open to us—past, present, and future. But all of that could not make us happy, and so… terrible things were done and are being done”— Her cheeks flush red, and her eyes flash with lightning—“all for the sake of some Seventh Day of final rest, brought about by our own hands.”

She looks away, and for the next several days, she doesn’t say a word. I do my best to cheer her up—playing our favorite sitcoms on the holoscreen, fixing her old Earth meals, and even engaging in the highly frivolous activity of painting her nails. And through that, we grow closer… close enough one night to kiss and then, in our own strange way, to fall in love.

She and I travel on into the western arm of the galaxy, to the places no human eyes have ever seen. Space has its own form of beauty, not unlike the vast, frozen tundras of old Earth—cold, stark, pure. But away from the collapsing civilization of the east and interplanetary wars, in this lonely corner of the universe, we have each other.

“Do you like this story?” she asks me one night after many years have passed.

“This story?”

“The one where a lost human meets a runaway time-jumper, and they fall in love in the vast emptiness of space, just as civilization is about to collapse, and they explore unknown worlds together.”

I smile at her, stroking her cheek. “Of course, I love our story.”

“Do you ever feel like going back and living it all over again?” She pauses the movie we’ve been watching. “What wouldn’t you give to watch your favorite movie for the very first time again? All the jokes would be funnier, all the sad moments more poignant, all the adventure more exciting.”

Her voice trails off, and she fiddles with the metal cube she’s been playing with ever since she emerged from her cocoon. Originally, I thought it was a fidget device, like one of those Old Earth toys. But slowly, the pieces had come together… her longing to forget the horrors in the future, to start from a place she couldn’t remember.

“You won’t remember,” she says softly and touches my chin with her finger. Her eyes linger on me. “And finally, neither will I. It’ll be better the next time. And there will always be a next time.”

I want to tell her that it would be better for us not to run, for us to learn to face the future and whatever it holds and embrace our finitude. But all my objections are melted by the sweet sadness in her expression. “Close your eyes,” she says, and I do.

And a blip appears on the holographic map of my galaxy-hopper. According to the data banks, there isn’t supposed to be anything in this region, just empty space. I blink and scratch my head.

Somehow, I feel like I’ve been here before.