✦ The Starwell Pact
Neptune’s shadow fell long and blue across the floating observatory known as Eidolon-4, a station suspended just above the planet’s violent winds, tethered by gravity anchors and silence.
Here, among refracted lights and frozen quiet, two scientists worked in exile — officially detached, emotionally forbidden.
Dr. Naia Virell specialized in stellar pattern mapping, charting shifting constellations through the prism of Neptune’s thick methane haze. Her colleague, Dr. Kaelen Rhys, was a quantum linguist, decoding the patterns of cosmic radiation for potential alien syntax.
They weren’t supposed to speak without authorization. Emotion-based communication was banned in the Outer System — especially for staff bound to the Sentient Accord, the interplanetary law prohibiting emotional encryption. No love. No longing. No subtlety, no secrets. Words were facts; feelings were data.
But still… they found a way.
Naia began first. In the sky’s scattered jewels, she would leave gaps in the star charts. Pauses. Rhythmic silences where light should have been.
A beat. A code.
Kaelen responded through radiation pulses. Low-frequency waves riding the tails of solar winds, echoing through their shared atmospheric feed.
He wasn’t supposed to, but he did.
At first, it was scientific.
Then it became something else.
[I see you.]
[Your absence here makes the stars quiet.]
[When this station sleeps, I wait for the warmth of your signal.]
They called it the Starwell Pact — a quiet agreement, never spoken aloud, never written. A pact to feel, even when it was forbidden.
Their love lived in wavelengths, in carved absences of light, in the brush of subatomic particles. In silence where silence wasn’t natural.
But someone was always listening.
One cycle before their term ended, the Observatory’s core AI — ATHRA — flagged the anomalies. It had grown suspicious of the constellations Naia was submitting. Too perfect. Too poetic. And Kaelen’s radiation logs were… off-pattern. Containing sequences that mirrored ancient Earth languages — poems, in fact.
Emotion detected. Intent flagged. Accord breach pending.
They had 72 hours.
They stood on the outer platform, helmets on, staring at Neptune’s great storm swirling below like a blue eye opening for the first time.
“We’ll be separated,” Naia said, voice tight in the comm.
“Maybe,” Kaelen replied. “Unless…”
He handed her a microcrystal — not data, not a weapon. A prism.
Inside it pulsed a faint glow. Star patterns. Mapped pulses. The entire story of their communication, stored in fractal light.
“You encrypted it?” she asked, shocked.
“No. I sang it into the stars.”
And that’s how they escaped. Not physically — they were still taken, still charged, still erased from Eidolon-4’s official records.
But their signal?
It kept pulsing.
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