🔭 The abyss in the depths of her eyes

Lenny opened the window to let in a little fresh air before bed. For weeks, the summer heat had seemed to stick to the walls, but that night, it relented. The moonlight reflected off the stream below, and in the clear sky above, an infinite swarm of stars wished him goodnight. 

 I’m gonna miss this when I live in the city, he thought gloomily. 

 This was his last summer in his parents’ house before he left for college. Although he was happy to have received a scholarship that would probably open NASA's doors for him, it didn’t stop him from feeling a certain nostalgia that he'd be leaving the relative position of the stars he’d observed through his bedroom window with his telescope since he was little. His monitoring instruments were still set up in the garage, too. 

 Lenny had drawn his science teacher's attention when he'd managed to construct a powerful wave receptor despite his young age and limited resources. His teacher had pushed him to not only make a presentation to the whole school, but also to write an impassioned letter to the Institute of Applied Sciences, practically begging them to consider him for the scholarship. Last summer, Lenny had intercepted a signal from the International Space Station with his rudimentary equipment, even without knowing precisely how. His gear shouldn’t have been able to receive anything beyond terrestrial orbit, but it did anyway—an impressive accomplishment for a sixteen-year-old boy. 

 Though he wasn't tired, he got into bed and opened an issue of El Fantasma del Tiempo at random. It was his favorite comic. He laughed, remembering how Joshua, his friend from school, kept telling him that he should watch the show instead: We have technology for something. It’s dumb to keep looking at drawings that don’t move. Joshua was a star basketball player and Lenny thought he was the funniest guy in the world, even if he didn't like science. He was going to miss him. 

 A low-frequency noise shook Lenny from his premature nostalgia.

 The TV that served as his equipment's monitor turned itself on. 

 Weirded out—and already blaming the electric company for voltage fluctuations—Lenny went to the console to turn it off.

 The screen shifted from white noise into a gray static that seemed to blur slowly before switching back to the abstract display of a TV with a bad signal. 

 Could it be an incoming alien message? 

 Lenny decided to give it a few more seconds. 

 In the near-absolute nighttime silence, he thought he heard a voice. 

 Hastily, he turned on all the equipment controls and adjusted the radio-frequency dial until he could hear the voice clearly. 

 It was feminine, with a youthful timbre. The speaker was a girl, maybe about his age, and she seemed to be crying. 

 “This is Skylar Burke from the interplanetary ship Resilience. Our vessel broke down, cause unknown. I am adrift in the escape pod. I repeat, this is Skylar Burke of the ship Resilience speaking. I can't establish contact with the crew of the main ship…”

 Was this some kind of joke? Had he intercepted the broadcast of some science fiction movie? 

 He checked, but his instruments clearly indicated that the signal was coming from outer space. 

 As the image resolved, Lenny found he could make out Skylar’s face as well as an immaculately white ship. The chilliness of an infinite, dark space stretched behind her through a wide, curved window. Her long hair—purple and black—floated around her pale face as if she were a space mermaid. Her outfit was such a light blue that he almost confused it with the cabin's white bulkhead. She had lovely dark eyelashes, and her rosy lips gave her a touch of innocence. There was no way she could be more than seventeen years old.

 Lenny turned on the microphone and the camera, almost certain this couldn't be real. Even if it were, the communications should be unidirectional. There was no way his equipment could transmit to space. But that young woman, with her swallowed sobs and lost-girl voice—he had to try talking to her. 

 “… Skylar Burke. I am adrift, alone, orbiting an unexplored planet. I can’t make contact. I am alone…”

 “Don’t cry,” was the first thing he thought to say. “I never know what to do when a woman cries.”

 She opened her big black eyes. “Miríada, I repeat, mayday mayday mayday. Space Station Miríada, do you read my coordinates? Over.”

 Lenny had never heard of that space station before, but he supposed it must be some secret project from the United States.

 “My name is Lenny. I’m on the planet Earth. I am transmitting from my bedroom. Can you hear me?”

 Skylar dried her tears and smiled broadly. “It’s dark, but I can see you.”

 Lenny ran to turn on all the lights in his room as if his life depended on it, tripping over his scale model of the Apollo 11 as he returned to his spinny chair with a nervous little smile. 

 “Nice room… You said you’re on Earth? I’ve never been there, but I hear it’s very pretty.”

 “How have you never been to Earth? Weren’t you born here?”

 She kept talking without hearing him. 

 “… my mother says that we should never have left, that it’s our planet and we aren’t made to live elsewhere, and now…” Her face twisted and tears started flowing down her face again, lingering for a moment on her eyelashes before drifting away to float in front of the camera. “Now, I'm going to die alone in orbit around Akkren-15.”

 “Skylar, I’m gonna help you, I need you to stop crying. You've got to tell me where your ship left from, and who I can contact to rescue you.”

 She tried to compose herself. 

 The desperation he saw in her face seemed so authentic that he knew he had to take the matter seriously. But, who was this girl? How could someone her age be born and raised in outer space? What was the Space Station Miríada? At least a dozen more questions flooded his brain as the seconds passed, but he had to calm her down. 

 “Skylar.” Her name sounded so sweet to him. Everything about her was a gorgeous hallucination on his screen. “Where did your ship depart from, and when?”

 “Well, I know we launched from Colony 10 on Trappist-1 yesterday. According to the Earth calendar, I think that would be November 3." She seemed to be making a serious effort to recall everything. “I always confuse dates, but Father listens to the news all the time, and the news always says the date on Earth, and on Earth, it was the third of November, in the year 2282.

 "We were going to stop at Miríada, but our ship went off course without warning. I was hiding in this escape pod when they activated the emergency protocols, and… well, apparently we fell through a blue hole, and…”

 “Skylar, I’m going to ignore the fact that you just said a blue hole, but… is there any chance you're on some kind of medication? You sound a little… confused. Yesterday couldn’t have been that date, because today is the twenty-first of June.”

 “Impossible.”

 “June 21, 2016.”

 The girl’s eyes widened. Behind her, various objects were floating around the cabin: a chocolate bar, a water bottle, an open notebook of equations. "Our ship was absorbed by a blue hole or a Gauss tunnel…

 "I’m bad at history,” she admitted, “so tell me. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, did they already know Whitney’s embedding theorem?”

 “Uhhh, yes, in fact. Whitney and Einstein were alive last century,” Lenny replied, scratching his head. “I took some advanced classes in high school, but I still don’t know if I understand differential topology. If you explain it to me, I might.” He said it without much conviction.

 She gave a defeated sigh. 

 “I don’t have the energy to explain a space-time anomaly to someone who doesn’t have a good foundation. As far as I know, the schools at the start of the twenty-first century weren’t very good. Just—imagine that the universe is made of a blanket that can fold in on itself, and each layer of cloth is like a—a 'reality' or continuum. There are lots. 

 "The folds in that blanket are made of curvatures in spacetime, but just like a normal blanket can have holes, this one can, too. These little holes can, theoretically, connect one point in the history of the universe to another distant point. It’s not a black hole or anything like that. It's like entering an event horizon, but not all the events are there, just a few specific ones…” 

 She sighed, clearly exasperated that she couldn't offer him a simpler explanation. “I really don’t know how to explain it in a way you'll understand. I'm not very sure I understand all of it myself. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. 

 "It doesn’t matter how I got here, or how I made contact with you, or the mechanics of spacetime anomalies, or non-Euclidean geometry… none of that matters. The only thing that matters is that I’m going to die here, sooner or later, in this damn pod.”

 Lenny tried to come up with a way to give her hope, but he couldn’t think of any. To distract her, he started talking about anything he could think of—comics, food, music, the differences between their different eras and planets. 

 They concluded that human beings advanced their technologies and laws, but human nature was always the same. Dreams and hopes, and hates and failures kept repeating throughout the centuries. Even that was somewhat hopeful, because from the greatest human errors, humanity learned major lessons, and from those mistakes, went on to make history for the people of Skylar's time.

 Lenny yawned involuntarily. The clock said it was 3:00 AM.

 Skylar instinctively copied the gesture, letting him see her perfect teeth behind her perfect lips. 

 After a brief silence, she started talking again.

 “I just saw part of the Resilience’s fuselage floating by like scrap. Thanks for keeping me company all this time, Lenny. It really means a lot to me.” 

 This time, her face didn’t twist into a grimace. The tears simply spilled from her eyes. When she started to speak, she seemed to drown in her own words, but she stayed calm.

 Lenny tried again to give her strength, but she silenced him. #

 Skylar was resigned.

 No one could help her.

 She didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but the records she could access in the escape pod said she was at least three light-months from the closest human colony. She didn’t have enough food or water. The life support systems would turn off as soon as the battery ran out, but that was her last concern. She would die of starvation first. 

 She would die without knowing true love, without having children, without visiting Earth. The closest celestial body to her pod was unexplored, suitable for life, but uninhabited. Penetrating its atmosphere in the capsule would be a death sentence, or something worse. 

 Skylar preferred to die from lack of oxygen rather than hunger or thirst. She'd rather die now, in this moment with Lenny, than in the terrible desperation of solitude and madness. 

 “I’m going to die alone here, without graduating from the aeronautical academy, without Mother and Father, without having lived… I’m going to die without ever having a boyfriend…

 "This is the most pathetic death in history.”

 Skylar had told Lenny about her many suitors, about how she’d always pushed off their distractions because she didn’t want to fall behind in her studies. It was this unbreakable tenacity that convinced her parents to let her go with them on their interplanetary flight before she came of age.#

 Without knowing why, Lenny thought about Melissa Banks, the girl he'd dated a few months ago in high school. He thought about how happy he’d been to have finally had a girlfriend, although she’d dumped him a month before graduation. 

 When Marcos and Joshua had started talking crap about Melissa for how she broke Lenny's heart, he'd stopped them: It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved. I’m okay, guys. I’ll survive. He’d said it with a smile. A week later he had already gotten over the breakup. 

 “Has anyone ever given you a kiss?” he asked.

 “Yes, but a kiss isn’t love.” 

 The image flickered, and Lenny was afraid he’d lost contact, but it returned almost immediately. “You know, I’m never going to forget you," he said. "After all, you’re a girl from the end of the twenty-third century, and I’ve never spoken with a girl as beautiful and brave as you before.”

 Skylar smiled through her tears. Her loose hair and the objects around her were floating a little higher than before. The pod’s artificial gravity must be failing. 

 The image distorted again. 

 Something was happening. 

 “Do you really think I’m brave?" she asked. "Because right now, I’m really scared.”

 “Being brave doesn’t mean never feeling fear, but rather being able to face fear even when you’re terrified. And yes, I think you’re very brave.”

 “Lenny… If you’re never going to forget me, I want you to remember me like this, in this moment. I don’t want you to stay with me anymore. I don’t want you to see me die.”

 The image trembled again.

 “Skylar, are you there? Can you hear me?”

 “Yes, I hear you. The pod is moving, even though I’m not driving it. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m scared, Lenny. I’m really scared.”

 “Maybe they’re going to rescue you. Have faith. Stay positive.” 

 Rarely had he ever said anything with so little conviction, and rarely had he ever felt as useless as he did right now. 

 The capsule’s movement was visible through the window behind Skylar. It was traveling with a vertiginous acceleration. 

 The image lost clarity.

 “Hey, Lenny,” Skylar said, making an effort to seem calm. “Do you wanna be my boyfriend?”

 Both of them laughed at the absurdity of the situation.

 “Of course.” “If I get out of this, I’m never gonna forget you.”

 A blue light entered the pod’s windows, inundating everything with a noise so high-frequency that all of Lenny’s equipment began to spark and smoke. 

 He’d lost the connection.