I met her in a club that didn’t exist anymore, in a city I couldn’t go back to. She was dancing like the loneliness drugs hadn’t touched her yet, like she still remembered what it felt like to lose yourself in music and bodies and light. I was already medicated by then. Everyone was. But something about the way she moved made me feel like I was missing something.
She materialized out of the crowd and asked me for a cigarette. I had one. While I fumbled for my lighter, she leaned in close enough that I could smell her—something sharp and alive under the club’s recycled air—and said, “I like you.”
Just like that. Direct.
“I never say that to people,” she added, taking the cigarette from my fingers. “Even people I actually like.” She smiled, then turned and dissolved back into the crowd.
I found her twenty minutes later at the bar. Came up behind her and put my hands on her waist, and she leaned back into me like we’d been doing this for years. The DJ dropped into something slow and heavy, and the world contracted to just the two of us swaying there, her body against mine.
Her apartment was one of those old converted units in the tech district—all clean lines and smart glass, the kind of place that adjusted the lighting based on your mood. She had a cat named Honey who sat on the kitchen counter and watched us with absolute judgment while we kissed our way to her bedroom, while my hands found the hem of her dress, while we forgot there was anything else in the universe worth paying attention to.
I was working tech maintenance in the district when I met her. She was studying xenobiology at the university—one of those fields that only existed because we’d gotten far enough out to need them. She’d talk about it sometimes, late at night, about patterns in how life adapted to different gravities, different light. I didn’t always understand, but I loved watching her face when she explained.
We had three months before her first mission. Three months of her apartment and Honey’s disapproving stares and learning how her body fit against mine. When she came back, I’d already quit the tech job. Life was happening too fast to stay in one place. We moved in together.
She went out on missions every few months after that. Each time she came back with something: a chunk of moon rock that glowed faintly in the dark, a fragment of meteor with colors I’d never seen, a vial of dust from a planet with three suns. Souvenirs, she called them. Proof she’d been somewhere I couldn’t follow.
The last thing she brought me was an egg. Blue, smooth, cold to the touch, roughly the size of both my hands cupped together. Larger than any egg I’d seen outside a museum.
“Take care of this for me,” she said. She was leaving for another mission in the morning.
I never saw her again.
We’d seen things together I couldn’t have imagined before I met her. Nebula storms visible from observation decks. Bioluminescent forests on a moon with no name. Nights where the stars were so thick it looked like someone had spilled light across the black. She’d pull me close and we’d just watch, her hand in mine, Honey purring between us.
After she left, I couldn’t do it anymore. Relationships, I mean. My parents wanted me to settle down, find someone new, build a life. I tried once or twice. But something had broken in me—not dramatically, not all at once, just the part that knew how to connect to people had gone quiet. The loneliness drugs helped. They made it easier to be alone. Everyone was taking them by then anyway.
I kept the egg on a shelf in my quarters. Wherever I went—new station, new contract—it came with me. A memorial. A blue stone she’d touched. I told myself she was still out there somewhere, doing whatever impossible thing she’d gone to do. The egg was proof she’d existed, proof we’d been real.
I kept it for a year and forty-seven days.
Then, one morning, I heard it crack.
The sound was so quiet I almost missed it. I was in my quarters, running diagnostics on the server arrays, when I heard something that didn’t belong. Like ice breaking on a frozen lake.
The egg.
I’d stopped thinking of it as anything but stone. For a year it had sat there, inert, a monument to someone who wasn’t coming back. But now there was a fracture running down its side, and as I watched, another line split the smooth blue surface.
I didn’t breathe. Couldn’t.
The shell fell away in pieces, and what emerged—
I don’t know how to describe what I felt in that moment. Like everything that had been numb in me suddenly woke up. Like the loneliness drugs stopped working all at once. Like becoming a father must feel, if anyone still did that the old way.
It was small. Blue-feathered, with eyes too large for its head, ancient and new at the same time. It looked at me, and I understood—with a clarity that hurt—that something alive had been waiting in the dark all this time while I’d treated it like a memorial.
It opened its mouth. No sound came out, but I felt it anyway.
This thing needed me.
It made no sound. Not at first. I wondered if maybe it communicated in frequencies I couldn’t hear, something above or below human range. It would open its beak and I’d feel something—a vibration in my chest, a pressure behind my eyes—but nothing I could call sound.
The habits came quickly.
It liked to nibble the hair on my legs while I worked. Just gentle tugging with its beak, weirdly methodical, moving from ankle to knee while I tried not to laugh. I’d be running code and suddenly this thing would be grooming me like I was another member of its flock.
It slept on my bed. Would hop up, land on my chest with more weight than something that small should have, and just stare at me. Those too-large eyes boring into mine. Then, as if satisfied with whatever it had determined, it would turn away and settle into the crook of my arm.
I tried bird seed first. Standard stuff, nutri-pellets designed for exotic species. It looked at the bowl, looked at me, and knocked it off the table with one deliberate sweep of its wing.
Fish, though. Fish it loved. I had to special-order frozen supplies, but the way it tore into the flesh, the almost joyful violence of it—I couldn’t say no.
I started calling it Duck. Not creative, but it fit.
Two months in, I realized the drugs had stopped working.
I’d been taking loneliness suppressants for years. Everyone did. You took your dose, the hollow feeling went away, and you could exist in your isolation without it eating you alive. Simple. Effective. Necessary for people like me who lived in server stations lightyears from anyone else.
But now I’d lie awake at night, Duck curled against my ribs, and I’d feel things. Grief. Loss. The absence of Sam like a physical wound. I increased my dosage. Nothing. The emptiness was back, but it wasn’t empty anymore—it was full of her.
I started thinking about the things she used to tell me. How time worked differently when you traveled far enough out. How she’d go on a six-month mission and come back aged eight months, a year, more. How every time she left, she was moving further away from me not just in space but in time itself.
The egg. How long had it been waiting? If she’d found it years before she gave it to me, if time moved differently where she’d been—
Duck’s feathers would glow sometimes when it breathed. Soft bioluminescence pulsing with each inhale, blue-green light washing across my quarters. I’d watch it and wonder: what kind of species was this? What did they do? What was their purpose?
I didn’t even know my own purpose anymore.
But Duck had one. It needed me. It chose to sleep pressed against me. It groomed my leg hair and knocked over bowls and stared at me like I mattered.
Maybe that was enough.
The drugs had done more than kill the loneliness. They’d killed the need to understand.
For over a year, I’d accepted that Sam was gone. Just gone. On a mission somewhere. The drugs made it easy to shrug, to not ask questions, to keep the egg on the shelf and never wonder why she’d given it to me.
But now I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Where had she gone? What mission was worth never coming back? And why had she given me this egg?
I started digging through her old files, the ones she’d left on our shared drive. Research documents I’d never bothered to open. Communications logs. Mission briefings.
At first, nothing. Standard xenobiological surveys. Sample collections. Routine reports.
Then I found a folder labeled “Paradox Species - DO NOT SHARE.”
Inside: hundreds of files. Images of creatures that looked almost like Duck. Video logs of Sam on a planet I didn’t recognize, watching these creatures in their natural habitat. And notes. Pages and pages of notes in her handwriting.
The first line stopped me cold:
“They’re dying. Not from disease or predation. They’re dying because they’ve forgotten how to need each other.”
I read through the night. Duck sleeping on my lap, my eyes burning from the screen.
Sam had found them on a distant moon. A species of highly intelligent avian creatures. She’d spent months observing them, documenting them.
They used to be born live, she wrote. Families. Parents who raised their young together, flocks that moved as one, complex social structures built on constant connection, constant communication.
But over generations, something changed. They evolved to lay eggs instead. Eggs that could survive alone. Eggs that didn’t need immediate care. The young hatched into isolation, and they never learned to need each other the way their ancestors had.
Each generation, more isolated than the last. More comfortable. Safer.
Extinct.
Sam’s notes became more urgent toward the end. Phrases underlined twice, three times. “Same pattern.” “We’re not learning from them—we’re following them.” “The drugs are just the beginning.”
I stopped reading. My hands were shaking.
She’d seen our future in theirs.
The video file was dated three days before she left. Sam, sitting in what looked like a research station, her hair shorter than I remembered, dark circles under her eyes.
“Hey,” she said, and smiled that crooked smile I’d forgotten I missed. “If you’re watching this, the egg hatched. I wasn’t sure it would. Time works differently out here—I’ve been gone six months for you, but it’s been almost four years for me. If I come back now, you’ll be gone. And if I come back later...” She looked away from the camera. “There won’t be anything to come back to.”
She took a breath.
“I found something. The government didn’t stumble onto loneliness drugs by accident. They engineered them. They studied species like Duck’s—species that went extinct through comfortable isolation—and they saw a blueprint. Isolated people don’t organize. Don’t resist. They just consume and comply and slowly disappear.”
Her jaw tightened.
“I have proof. All of it. But if I bring it back, they’ll bury it. Bury me. Bury you. So I’m staying here, documenting everything, sending it out through channels they can’t trace.”
She leaned closer to the camera.
“I gave you Duck because I needed you to feel it. Really feel it. The drugs won’t work around it—I don’t know why, something about their biology. You’re going to feel lonely and it’s going to hurt and you’re going to want it to stop. Don’t let it stop. That feeling? That’s you being alive. That’s you being human.”
Her eyes were bright. Not quite crying, but close.
“Take care of it. Let it take care of you. And fight them the only way that matters—by refusing to be alone. I love you. I’m sorry. Don’t let them win.”
The video ended.
I stopped taking the drugs three days later.
The loneliness came back like a wave—sharp, overwhelming, real. I wanted to take them again. My hands shook reaching for the bottle. Duck knocked it off the counter before I could open it, then sat there staring at me with those enormous eyes.
I let myself miss her. Really miss her. The ache of it, the impossibility of her being trapped in a different timestream, the anger at what they’d done to us, to everyone. It hurt like hell.
Duck stayed close. Groomed my leg hair. Stared at me with those too-large eyes. Slept against my ribs, that strange subsonic vibration thrumming through both of us.
A week later, I did something I hadn’t done in years. I opened a comm channel to another maintenance worker three stations over. Just talked. About nothing. About Duck. About how the drugs had stopped working for me.
“Mine too,” she said after a long pause. “I thought it was just me.”
“It’s not just you,” I said.
Duck chirped—not a sound exactly, but I felt it in my chest. Something that might have been approval, or hope, or just the simple fact of being alive and witnessed.
I didn’t know if it would change anything. Probably it wouldn’t. The government was too big, the system too entrenched, the comfortable numbness too seductive.
But Sam had given me something that refused to let me be comfortable in my isolation, and I wasn’t going to waste that. I was going to keep talking to people. Keep feeling things, even when it hurt. Keep taking care of this creature that shouldn’t exist but did.
The rebellion, I was learning, was just this: choosing to feel. Choosing to reach out. Choosing Duck over the drugs, connection over comfort, being human over being manageable.
It was the smallest, hardest thing in the universe.
It was enough.