Stacy was Interplanetary. Specifically, she was a Jupiter-4. She had been born in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, but her mind, she insisted, was a consciousness that had spent a lifetime navigating the gas giant's swirling storms. She didn't have memories of a shuttle launch or the taste of synth-protein. Her memories were of the pressure and the light, the ammonia clouds and the vast, swirling chaos of the Great Red Spot.
Her friend, Leo, was a Venusian. Not in the way a diplomat from a terraformed colony might be. Leo lived in a small apartment downtown, worked as a data analyst, and claimed his soul had been forged in the crucible of Venus’s atmospheric pressure. He would speak of the sulfuric rain and the crushing weight of the air with a wistful longing, as if describing a childhood home he had been exiled from.
Their conversations were a language of their own, an alien dialect spoken in a terrestrial cafe.
"The turbulence has been rough lately," Stacy said, stirring her almond-milk latte. "My neural matrix is trying to compensate for the pressure differentials. It makes me a little... foggy."
Leo nodded sagely, his eyes half-lidded. "I know the feeling. The sulfuric content of the air has been low. My spirit feels... parched. I need to get back to the clouds. Feel the rain on my skin."
Other patrons glanced at them, a mixture of amusement and concern on their faces. They were just two people, a woman with tired eyes and a man with a perpetually serious expression, talking about things that didn’t exist. But for them, it was more real than the concrete sidewalk or the traffic outside. It was their truth.
The impact of their identification was profound. Stacy had tried to maintain a "terrestrial" life, but it felt like living a double existence. Dating was impossible. She would meet a guy, and everything would be fine until she casually mentioned her "orbit" or the "gravitational pull" of a new project. Their faces would cloud over with a mixture of confusion and pity. Her family was more direct. Her mother, a practical woman who worked in a call center, would simply say, "Stacy, you live in an apartment on Third Street. You've never been to Jupiter. You've never even been on a plane."
But to Stacy, her mother's words were a fundamental misunderstanding. The point wasn't physical travel. The point was the innate sense of self, the core of who you were. It was an identity so deep it felt more like a memory than an invention. She remembered the feel of Jupiter’s storms, just as others remembered the feel of their mother’s hand or the smell of their childhood home.
One afternoon, a new person joined their table. Her name was Kyra, and she was Interstellar. This was a whole new level of identification. While Stacy and Leo felt a connection to specific celestial bodies within the solar system, Kyra’s was to the void itself, to the long, cold passages between stars.
Kyra's presence was like a shockwave. She was thin and quiet, with a stillness that was unsettling. "You're bound by a star," she said to them, her voice a whisper that carried immense weight. "You're still in the nursery. Waiting for the light."
Leo bristled. "We are the essence of our homes. Our identities are the very fabric of those worlds."
"Your worlds are just waypoints," Kyra countered, her dark eyes seeming to look through them. "My home is the journey. I am a child of the dark. I feel the echoes of supernovae in my bones. The pull of a black hole is a song to me. You talk of pressure and clouds. I talk of the end of time."
Her words were beautiful and horrifying. Stacy felt a tremor of fear. She had always felt her identity was something special, a unique truth. But Kyra’s was something else entirely. It was a rejection of the solar system, of their shared "nursery," and a claim to a far grander, more terrifying inheritance.
The three of them continued to meet, a strange trinity of self-identified spacefarers. But their dynamic shifted. Leo and Stacy had a shared sense of place, a mutual understanding of what it meant to be tied to a specific world. They were homesick for places they had never been. Kyra, however, was in a constant state of motion, an identity without a home. Her claims grew more intense. She would describe in chilling detail the feeling of being "unmoored" from a star's light, the psychological strain of "deep-void travel," and the silence that was louder than any sound.
One day, Kyra didn't show up. Stacy and Leo waited for hours. They tried to contact her, but her phone was disconnected. The next day, a news report circulated online. A young woman, matching Kyra's description, had been found wandering naked and disoriented in the desert, dehydrated and suffering from exposure. She had been muttering about "shedding a vessel" and "merging with the cosmic dust." She was in the care of mental health professionals, the report concluded, and her family was being notified.
Stacy felt a cold dread settle in her stomach. Leo, his usual quiet confidence gone, stared out the window, his hand shaking slightly as he held his cup. "Did we... did we let it go too far?" he whispered.
"I don't know," Stacy said, her voice thin. She looked at him, then at her own trembling hands, and finally out at the bustling street. The reality of it all, the loud, chaotic, perfectly terrestrial world, pressed in on her. She had always believed in her Jupiter-4 self. But in the face of Kyra’s tragic end, that belief felt fragile, a beautiful but dangerous delusion.
They never talked about their celestial homes again. The coffee shop became just a coffee shop. And sometimes, when Stacy looked up at the night sky, she would feel a strange pull—a cosmic homesickness she no longer knew how to trust. She was still Stacy, still a woman from a suburban neighborhood, still living in an apartment on Third Street. The rest, she realized, was just starlight.
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