Science Fiction Short Stories (Once Apart of Wattpad's SmackDown Competition)

1.1 ~ Alone

“Is she asleep?”

Crescent looked over her shoulder. “Like a light.”

“She really hates me, doesn’t she?”

“It’s not like that.” Crescent shook her head. “She’s just… Protective.”

“So she doesn’t trust me?”

She pulled the mic closer. “It’s not just you.”

“Do you trust me?” said the voice in her ear—the voice she’d known since her creation.

“Of course.”

But there lived a little voice inside her that echoed doubt. After all she’d seen. After the numerous warnings Star gave her. Maybe Star was just cynical. Or maybe she herself was intentionally naive. 

A silence loomed throughout the cabin. For a time, his voice was gone, and she glued her eyes to the glowing control panel.

He was merely a voice—and her? A reflection in the thick glass. What else was there beyond forsakenness? His voice allowed her to cope, but it didn’t seem genuine. He had no face. It didn’t feel human.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m... Lost. Like I’m—Sometimes I feel so… So—”

“Alone.”

Crescent’s hand traced the gaps between the square buttons. She pondered the word—how sad it sounded, like an abandoned child’s cry. She finally understood: what it means to be human.

“It could be worse,” his voice returned, more cheerfully. “My grandpa used to always tell me—” he elevated his voice and added a quiver to it: “Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. He joined in. He always found a way to put a smile on her face. But her joy quickly burned away and jealousy seeped in like hot wax. She envied his ignorance.

A notice flashed across the glass. The pale light snagged her eye.

“Accept it.”

Crescent hesitated. 

“You said you trust me, right?”

She licked her lips and veered back at Star who was still fast asleep in the other room. Somehow, she felt she was still watching her. 

Her eyes were guilty. Her mind, skeptical—just enough for her to feel uneasy but not enough for her to refuse. She accepted.

“Sit back and relax,” he said. But the clicking noises she heard from his comms made her distracted.

When the cabin’s speaker above her began to sound, she leaped from her chair with two electric blades in her fists. 

“Easy! Haven’t you ever heard music before?”

She realized that she was breathing heavily into the mic. In truth, he was the one who’d never heard music before—not real music. 

She set her blades down and returned to her chair.

“Now look at the stars,” he said, as the guitar chords radiated throughout the cabin. 

She saw past her reflection towards the sea of twinkling lights. Naturally, her eyes wandered from the stars to the world that made up the horizon below—the world once whole.

“Are you looking at it too?” said the voice. 

The rip through the planet remained a sight impossible to resist. The chasm between the two halves of earth was filled only by the void of space, just like the chasm she felt in her chest the moment she realized she’d heard this song before.