PROLOGUE
The ship's western hall was a futuristic amphitheater where the daily routine bled into the contemplation of the impossible. Between tables cluttered with notes and whiteboards scrawled with equations, the air was thick with the scent of specialty coffee and peppermint oil. The low murmur of programmers debating formulas for the black hole looming outside completed the scene.
"Fancy, right?" Blizka crossed her arms, her posture a challenge, yet utterly relaxed.
"Fancy? Are you serious?" Nunes muttered, slumped into the sofa as the exhaustion of the night watch settled deep in his muscles. "This whole aesthetic is crap, man!"
The place was a monument to the old Frutiger Aero aesthetic—translucent surfaces, soft curves, lights that seemed to float mid-air.
"'Man'?" She pinned him with a stare, as if awaiting a verdict. "Do I look like a guy to you, asshole?!"
"Oh, shit. My bad, babe... I'm so tired I can't even think straight," he chuckled, dragging his palms down his face. "It's this ship! It's messing with my head... You know I'm one of those people who watch old movies just to see streets without the FUCKING LED lights EVERYWHERE... and this place is the exact opposite. It's visual pollution, is what it is."
"Visual pollution, huh?" Blizka closed the distance between them, a slow smile spreading across her lips as her hands found their way to his waist. Her touch was deliberate, like testing the temperature of water. "At least I smell better. Definitely not like..."
He grumbled. "Peppermint," rolling his eyes in disgust. "Why can't they just call it 'mint'?"
"Hey, love..." She brought a hand to his chin, her touch tilting his face up to hers. "Just relax... you're all stressed out."
"I know. Sorry."
"Later... how about you and me? Again?" she whispered, her nails digging lightly into the nape of his neck. "Once you've rested, I think you deserve to get away from these nerds... and get a whiff of... my scent. That cotton-blossom body wash... the one that makes you MELT with desire."
The tired, sour mask Nunes wore melted away, replaced by a look that spoke volumes. Silence could be a black hole, swallowing everything except the scream trapped inside you. And Blizka could read him like no one else ever had.
Her hands pressed against his back, her nails scratching lightly through the fabric of his shirt. A touch that promised everything and nothing, all at once.
"Notes and olfactory families... like those... those FUCKING tonka bean ones!" she whispered, a feral grin spreading as she pulled him closer. "Just like hers, damn it... just like the ones you used to crave, huh?!"
He swallowed hard. "Just like hers" still didn't comfort him as it should have—perhaps it would never be what she wanted it to be.
"Mhm..." He forced a smile, his lips trembling with a heat born of shyness and exhaustion. "And to top it all off... some lazy jazz... a warm, dimly lit bathroom... hmm...!"
A slow smile touched both their lips. His hand rose to her neck, the movement of a man dying of thirst finally reaching an oasis. His fingers traced a story of ancient yearning against her skin.
"I like how you taste," he whispered, biting his lip, the gesture heavy with fatigue and desire. "It's... addictive. You know? Like the goddamn ship's peppermint. It suits you. Being all... small and dangerous."
"I know... and only I know." She narrowed her eyes to slits, her face drawing closer until her forehead rested against his. "It's our little secret, my corrupt little Officer…"
Nunes felt his stomach churn. He had met her at the beginning of the mission under… peculiar circumstances. This was too fast, wrongly so—as if their romance had miscalculated and forgotten to fix something broken—or perhaps it was simply an excuse to fill a void of affection.
"Mind if I sit?" she whispered, though she didn't need permission.
"Yeah, whatever," Nunes muttered, patting the sofa without enthusiasm. "Sit down. I'll give you a head rub before you sleep. Just don't jump me like last ti—!"
"HA!" Blizka leaped, in an awkward, graceless hop. "COME ON, YOU IDIOT!" She jammed her hands into his stomach, her fingers digging and tickling the sensitive skin. "Roll over! Make some room! I want to lie down!"
"GET OFF! GET THE FUCK OFF ME!" he roared, laughing uncontrollably.
"TURN TO THE SIDE ALREADY!" She bit her lips, her fingers digging deeper into his flesh.
"FINE! FINE, DAMN IT!"
Nunes's voice, unexpectedly loud in the sealed corridor, shattered the air like the crack of glass under a boot. In an instant, all ambient noises—the consoles' beeps, the murmur of conversations, even the subtle hum of the ventilation—vanished.
Three technicians in blue lab coats froze mid-gesture at a nearby panel. An analyst, clipboard tucked under her arm, stood frozen, her lip slightly parted, as if she had choked on a word. Every gaze, without exception, locked onto Nunes, but in a cold, dehumanized way. It wasn't anger or curiosity. It was the silence of a failure, the strangeness of a machine operating outside its parameters.
A cold wave of discomfort traveled up Nunes's spine. He clenched his teeth, his face flushing with heat.
"Not again, for fuck's sake." He squeezed his eyes shut, the blush spreading across his skin.
He brought his hands to Blizka's wrists, squeezing them as if to say, That's enough.
She went still under his grip. When she turned her face, her expression was suddenly sheepish.
Beyond the window, the aquatic moon cast its "Blue-Dome" gleam. That's what the space engineers called it: an ethereal fusion between the murky water and the deep-blue and blood-red glimmers of the supermassive black hole. To him, the cosmic spectacle looked like nothing more than a giant summer pool.
"Sorry. I forgot they look at us differently…"
"It's not about treating us differently, love." Nunes inhaled deeply, his hands slowly moving up to her face, his touch an attempt to be an anchor in a reality that was cracking. "It's just that they say you don't exist. That scares me, you know?"
Blizka didn't just smile; her mouth split into a macabre fissure that tore her face open. That was not a human smile; it was a living deformity that challenged anatomy, a tear too wide, too wrong to fit on a normal woman's face.
A chilling, nauseating shiver ran down Nunes's spine, the kind of cold that comes not from a blizzard but from the sight of something that shouldn't exist. The horror lay in the teeth: glossy white, like polished ivory, but too numerous, too long, and too sharp. They gleamed under the weak light, like a mouthful of exposed fangs, ready to tear. For one terrifying instant, Nunes saw not his girlfriend, but a mask of flesh stretched over a hungry skull.
"I know it scares you," her mouth snapped shut, the smile vanishing like a slammed door. "But I try so hard... so hard to teach you. It's the only way. Love isn't just a feeling. It's obedience. And you are divergent on this issue."
He blinked, confused.
"Sometimes you remind me of my ex-girlfriend, you know? I told her exactly that when—"
"When she broke up with you in a voice message?" She laughed, the sound of it too familiar, too precise, to be a coincidence. "It's been weeks, Nunes. She's gone. You know she's not coming back."
Nunes swallowed hard, a fresh shiver tracing his spine, not from fright, but from the brutal accuracy of the hit.
"I just... look, I want my life back. I want to finish this mission and... go home. Back to New York. Back to her... but she won't have me."
"I feel like changes are coming..." She narrowed her eyes, shifting with a calculated, predatory slowness as she slid onto his lap. The transition was subtle, yet total. "I think that—"
"Love... no!" He widened his eyes, his hands coming up to her shoulders, a weak attempt to push her away. His forehead furrowed in desperation. "There are people watching... this is wrong."
"Do you want me to leave? Go take your damn Xanax." She crossed her arms, the motion deliberately slow, her forearm brushing against his waist. It was too wrong to be pleasurable; and precisely because of that, it was pleasurable. "You did that to her, Nunes. She's cold because of you... you know that."
The ship's soundtrack, an old, low-quality song—full of metallic echoes and jagged synthesizers—blended with the rhythm of the high-heeled footsteps of the two astronomers crossing the corridor, discussing the black hole's dilation.
"You know that... and everything is going to get shaken up again."
"Again?" he murmured, his eyes closing in surrender, as the pace of her intimacy quickened.
"Who knows, maybe THIS TIME it will be different, right?" Blizka chuckled, her hands moving to Nunes's back, her nails digging into his flesh like talons. "Tell me."
He gasped, an involuntary moan escaping through his teeth.
"Shit... what?"
"Do you remember her?"
"...Ketlen?"
Immediately, the women's conversation ceased. They both turned their heads in unison, their movements perfectly synchronized, and their eyes locked onto Nunes for a second that stretched into something cold and rigid. It wasn't curiosity; it was a silent, almost surgical analysis, as if they were cataloging a malfunction. Blizka didn't even blink. The silence stretched too long.
"You said you dreamed about her, right?" She turned her face, as if studying his every micro-expression with absurd precision.
"That's right…" He let out a nervous, disheveled laugh. "Ever since I boarded this ship… I've been having awful nightmares. Like sleep paralysis. It's always the same girl, like I've known her for ages... an intimacy that defies explanation. I don't know."
He waited—but the answer was not forthcoming. The astronomers in the hallway resumed their walk, their physics discussion picking up exactly where it had stopped, without so much as a missed beat, as if nothing had happened.
"And..." he pressed on, as if he owed them a better explanation. "Ever since Laura broke up with me... and you showed up... everything's been a mess, you know? This Ketlen appears in my dreams and... it's so real. Sometimes we kiss. Or we get married. Or we walk hand-in-hand on beaches at night. It feels so real it hurts."
"...Right," Blizka nodded, her smile not reaching her eyes. "You know... I'm going to give you time. I think..."
She laughed, a childlike giggle that clashed violently with the unsettling situation. She leaned in, and her lips touched Nunes's, but it wasn't a kiss. It was an ethereal imprint, a touch that held neither warmth nor weight. He felt it like a whisper against his skin, a fragment of a memory he already knew, but which refused to fully materialize.
"After this little kiss, you'll sleep well, won't you?"
"Y-yeah... sure," He nodded, the motion frantic. "Yes, yes... just leave me alone for a bit. When I wake up, I'll... we'll talk again. Can we?"
"Of course," she slid off Nunes's lap, her gaze still mischievous, and whispered. "But I noticed you liked it. You got hard with me on top of you, Officer."
She smiled, biting her lips as she walked away—Nunes stayed, his face red with shame, collapsing back onto the sofa, completely surrendered to exhaustion.
It wasn't Blizka—Nunes knew she was a delusion stemming from the trauma of the breakup voice message.
"Shit, I hope this whole ex-girlfriend and Ketlen thing doesn't give me nightmares again." The thought made his brow furrow.
The Officer sank deeper into the sofa, which felt more like a gift, given the sheer audacity of this impossible journey—light refracted into spectral colors that cut across the polished floor and gleamed in the scientists' tired eyes, a constant reminder that their presence here was more than a scientific achievement—it was an affront to the very fabric of the universe. They had crossed a wormhole hidden behind Mars, a forgotten rift that connected the solar system's backyard to the center of the Andromeda galaxy.
"I still remember your scent, Laura. Sometimes in detail. Do you still remember mine?"
Every fiber of the sofa molded to him, sculpted in silence, ready to receive each sigh—a technological secret too delicate for life outside the mission.
"If I dream of her staring at me like that again… I'll lose my mind," he murmured, a faint, bitter smile touching his lips.
In the background, the programmers' whispers turned into music: one pair murmuring about Python and Lua, another comparing algorithms in different tongues. That mosaic of voices, rhythmic and diffuse, cradled his mind like a strange lullaby in the abyss of the stars…
"NUNES..."
But among that chorus, a dissonance sliced through. A muffled sound, almost agonized. Like a metallic scrape echoing from the far wall of the ship. Nunes held his breath, convinced it was just his imagination. Yet it wasn't only the scraping: there was also a voice. Low, dragging itself, as if it were calling him. Not just by name—but by something deeper, more intimate.
"COME DREAM ABOUT ME..."
The paranoia tightened its grip, and Nunes felt a glacial chill run through his body, not because of the ship's temperature, but due to the unshakeable certainty that he was not alone inside his own head.
"It's her… shit."
Deep down, he prayed not to dream of her again. Not like that. Not naked, standing in his room… But the voice, muffled and scraping, seemed to slither into his ear that he no longer had a choice.
CHAPTER 1: KETLEN
"Ah, shit." Nunes lifted his face off the floor. The dark room, drool caked on his cheeks. "Did I black out?"
Kitchen. Only the ticking of the clock in the background.
September 25, 2027.
3:30 a.m., New York City, penthouse apartment.
The ticking marked time—constant, robotic, predictable. But something was wrong in the repetition: as if each beat came just a little late, or too soon. The sound didn't sync with the real world. It was a nightmare metronome, warning the dream was already doomed to burn.
TRRRIM-TRRRIM!
"Shit, the Xanax knocked me out hard."
He stood, the landline's ringing his only compass in the dark.
TRRRIM-TRRRIM!
And he answered.
"Hello...?" Nunes frowned.
... Nothing.
Just static.
"Hi..." The voice came from the darkness.
"AH!" Nunes spun around, eyes raking across the kitchen. "WHO?!"
He felt it then, hands sliding around his waist, now brushing lightly up his neck. That lethal gentleness—like someone crushing a bird underfoot, just to hear the crack.
"Ketlen…?"
I'm right here...
"I'm here... it's alright..." she whispered, licking the back of his neck, making him arch his back. "I need your help, Nunes. Again."
Her tongue traced his skin—hot, rough, almost animal. A shiver bolted up his spine, too wrong to be pleasure… and precisely because of that, it was pleasure.
"W-what kind of help?" he gasped, his body betraying him. "Tell me, love…"
"Pick a number from the phone... for me. Go on..."
The whisper slid softly against his ear, promising midnight secrets. But the details betrayed it: a broken cadence, a vowel stretched too long. Human… but only on the surface.
He frowned, confused, now staring at the phone's screen.
"Incoming call: CHOOSE A NUMBER"
"What for, babe?"
"This... will speed things up SO MUCH... you have no idea."
"What things?" He shut his eyes as she pressed her hips into him. "Ah… this time it's not making sense."
"Click... choose."
Her hips ground into his in a slow, possessive gesture. The warmth was human, but the rhythm—irregular, off-balance—gave away the imitation. Like dancing with a body alive and a dead echo at once.
"But…" Nunes froze suddenly, eyes widening. "Wait a second…"
"Choose, love...!" The roar was wet, primal, and nails dug into his flesh.
Pain and desire merged, pulsing on the same spot. Intimacy, but warped—as if love had grown teeth.
"CHOOSE, YOU SCUM!" The breath hit his face: heavy with cold rust, as if a corpse had rehearsed seduction.
"BITCH!" He spun around. "You…?!"
She was gone. The peppermint flooded the air, sweet and heavy with memory. No shapes, no smoke—just the scent of longing and sin, the kind that doesn't exist outside the most intimate nightmares. The kind that never fades. Addictive.
Only the certainty of a disappearance.
"I want to see her… again." Nunes squeezed his eyes shut, tears falling in a frantic rhythm. "Please… I just want to see the real Ketlen…"
For one second… the ticking stopped, the scent of peppermint vanished.
When he opened his eyes... he was back in her dark room.
Nunes could see her; she was sitting in a fetal position on the floor, a jar of Klonopin just ahead. Completely different—she was now wearing simple pajamas.
"Ketlen?!" Nunes shouted.
She looked up at him, face wrecked from crying, snot dripping from her nose. It was uncomfortable. Too real. Too human.
And it hurt to see her that way—as if an urgent, unshakable care for her suffering bloomed inside his numbness, like a flower withering but saved at the last second by a hummingbird.
It was as if… something beyond time, beyond logic, whispered that her shared pain was already his.
And in that instant, he understood.
It wasn't just her pain hitting him.
It was the shock of seeing someone so shattered… and still feeling the urge to draw closer.
Shame came first—a knot in his chest.
As if desire itself was an offense before her tears.
But soon, another urgency was born.
Not to possess.
But to protect.
To stay.
To carry, even for a moment, a piece of that pain.
It wasn't the first time he had seen those eyes—it was the first time he felt them.
Before, in other loops, the eyes he found were hers, beautiful but hollow, distorted…
They looked like hers, but they weren't. A broken version—an uncanny valley copy of a love yet to come.
But now… it was her. In all her pain. In all her flaws.
And even so… or maybe because of it… he felt something new. Something warm. Inexplicable. As human as she was. Something that shouldn't have been there—but was. And it was growing.
Like the poppy fields in the First World War.
"Why do you come to me in my dreams?" he whispered, voice slow, almost childlike.
How to explain that he felt something for someone he didn't technically know yet?
How to explain that, seeing her, he wanted to hold her, protect her—even if she was the one who had appeared naked in his own bedroom without explanation?
How to explain that her pain felt more his than hers?
It was a paradox. Like time folding back on itself into a Möbius strip—where inside and outside become one, and there's no longer a "right" side to the surface.
She was the flower, and he the hummingbird.
But she was also the hummingbird, and he the flower.
Because in some impossible bend of fate, he had already loved her. And she had already lost him.
They weren't meeting—they were reuniting at a broken point in spacetime.
Like two entangled particles, separated by light-years, yet still feeling one another.
Like an emotional singularity, where every certainty collapses into a single feeling that can't be named.
And there, in that dark room, with a red light pulsing at the edge of reality, he felt the first crack in his depression.
Because she wasn't just a girl crying on the floor.
She was… tomorrow bleeding into today.
And he… the present that hadn't yet learned to love her as the past demanded.
"NUNES!"
The world shook.
Like the eye of a hurricane about to close.
Heat burned, but cold froze from within.
"NUNES, WAKE UP!"
He drew a deep breath.
Once more.
Still trapped in the nightmare…
The paradox echoed in layers.
Like a fractal repeating.
Like a serpent devouring its own tail.
Only the tail never vanished.
Because the bite was an illusion too.
Mirrors reflecting mirrors.
Each image farther from reality.
Until "reality" was just an empty word.
A symbol with no referent.
"WAKE UP!!!"
Until something tugged him back.
A poke.
Small, but definite.
"NUNES!" Rui shouted, poking him harder on the couch.
"AAAHH!!" Nunes jolted upright, chest heaving, gasping. "KETLEN?!"
The scream ripped through the cabin air, not like a normal sound, but like an emergency siren. Dozens of pairs of eyes turned to Nunes, but what struck him most wasn't the gaze itself, but the instant stillness that followed. Nobody moved, nobody coughed, nobody went back to typing. They stared at him, not with concern, but with the cold, absolute indifference of someone observing an animal in a zoo, or perhaps, an object of study behaving in a predictable and undesirable way.
"Hey! Chill, man!" Rui laughed, nervous, everyone on the ship staring at them. "You were moaning the girl's name out loud. Again!"
Nunes panted, tears spilling.
It was him—the friend Nunes never had—and that's why he persisted.
"Sorry... w-what name was I shouting? Blizka's name?"
Rui blinked, confused.
"Blizka?!" He raised an eyebrow. "There are no women on our crew, dude."
...
Nunes' heart stopped beating for half a second, a chill of dread passing through his stomach.
"What do you mean there were no women?"
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