The Light Between Worlds

Year 3047.

Humanity had long left Earth behind. The stars had become their new oceans, and the planets their islands. Somewhere in the outer rim of the Lyra system, there was a small observation station called Vega Outpost Nine. It was there that Aris worked, alone, cataloging cosmic signals that drifted through the void.

Her job was simple: listen to the stars.

Every day, she tuned the receivers, logging transmissions from pulsars, mapping radiation bursts, and tracking fragments of lost communication. Most signals were nothing more than static. Until one day, a voice came through.

It was faint at first, buried beneath cosmic noise.
“Is anyone out there?” the voice said.

Aris stared at the console. No scheduled transmissions, no registered frequency.
She replied instinctively, “This is Vega Outpost Nine. Identify yourself.”
A pause, then laughter, soft and human. “My name is Kael. I am from the Helion Colony, orbiting Kepler 442b. Who are you?”

Aris hesitated. No one lived that far out anymore, not since the collapse of the Helion network a hundred years ago. But the signal was clear, impossibly clear.
“Aris,” she said. “And if this is real, Kael, then you are talking to someone a hundred light years away.”

He laughed again. “Then it is a very long distance conversation.”

From that night on, they spoke every time the planets aligned and the signals could pass through the relay gates. Sometimes the light took hours to reach her, sometimes days. But she always waited.

They talked about everything. About the stars, about music, about how silence felt in space. He told her of a world bathed in orange light, where the oceans shimmered like molten glass. She told him of the frozen moons around Vega, where the air was thin and the nights endless. Somewhere between their words, between the delay of light years, something like love began to grow.

One evening, Kael asked her, “What does your sky look like right now?”
She smiled at the console. “Like a thousand candles in a black sea. And yours?”
“Like a storm of fire. But I think I see your star. The one you named Aris.”
“That is not my star,” she whispered. “That is you, Kael.”

Time in space does not move like on Earth. Days blurred into cycles, and messages took longer to arrive. Then, one day, the signals stopped. Aris waited through three rotations. Then ten. Then a year.

She tried everything, recalibrated every antenna, rerouted every channel. But all she found was silence. Still, she sent messages into the void. “Kael, this is Vega Outpost Nine. Are you there?” No reply.

Finally, one day, the console blinked. A signal.

It was faint, distorted by distance and time. She could barely make out his voice through the static.

“Aris… if you hear this… the colony is falling. The sun has turned against us. But I see the light from Vega. It is beautiful. If I could reach you, I would.”

Then the line went dead.

She sat in silence for a long time, watching the faint glow of the transmission die across the screen. Outside the observation dome, Vega burned bright, steady, eternal.

Years passed. No one came to relieve her post. The outpost fell quiet, buried under dust and frost. But every night, Aris climbed the tower and looked toward the distant point of Kepler 442b.

There, among the countless stars, she would always whisper, “I see your light, Kael.”

And somewhere across the centuries of space, in the thin echo of dying waves, perhaps he still answered. For love, like starlight, travels forever, long after the worlds that created it are gone.