Twin Orbits

My "Scarlet Yearnings" review, story by story: "Love in Cosmic Times".

Seeking a docking in private space - AI image by NightCafé

Third story in the debut Scarlet Yearnings collection by author Scarlet Ibis James is a longer and more complex effort.

Love in Cosmic Times is 2 260 words long and is written from two linked viewpoints: Tessa and Wright.

Moving away from themes of parental affection matured into adult desires, this story maintains the overall yearning for connection.

Or does it? There is a child involved, as we discover in a devastating twist in the tale.

Crossed orbits

Tessa is looking for love through “the old world of digital dating”. We’re in a future world, one where space travel is within the reach of private citizens. The opening sentence talks of “orbital taxis” and “twin suns”.

Twins, eh? Tessa finds someone:

He was as average-looking as a Latino-Afro-French person could be—which was hot to me. I detected an unassuming presence about him that belied his adventurous spirit. He was an astronaut, after all. His warm, dark eyes held a hint of mischief. Every time that charming smile graced his thick lips, my heart skipped a beat.

They can’t meet - he’s stationed on a moon several galaxies away, after all - but they make a digital connection, talking via video link, confiding to one another, “sharing our deepest desires and fears”.

Curiously, the story begins with Tessa arriving on Wright’s distant outpost, her heart full of emotion, her life on the brink …

She conveniently narrates the story of how she got to that point. Apart from this vast divide, they are perfect for each other. He is exactly the man of her dreams, his softly-accented voice resonating while his image fills her with longing.

As Tessa confesses to us, “our hearts were intertwined”.

How could she not find a way to meet him in the flesh?

---

This story is structured.

Space: Tessa is living in an apartment in some future city. Apart from the twin suns in an azure sky crossed by the arching paths of orbital taxis, the location isn’t specified.

Space travel is, apparently, routine and Tessa can spend “the little money I had” to take a spaceship across the “so many galaxies between us” to the coordinates of his lunar base.

After she returns home she goes looking again - in a city where people live in apartments, emergency vehicles sound their sirens as they race through the streets, and no details seem any different from our own world - and she finds Wright through some computer sleuthing.

As an aside, I found the details of this cosmos a little jarring. I’ve been raised on classic science fiction and, without some fundamental breakthrough in the laws of physics, communication, let alone travel, between locations separated by intergalactic distances isn’t going to be easy, quick, or cheap. In fact, a phone call to someone located on our own moon is going to be marked by speed-of-light delays stretching to several seconds between question and answer.

But hey, this is science fiction and difficulties can vanish with a wave of the writer’s pen.

Time: Tessa stands on an ambiguous cosmic surface and is telling us the backstory of how she got to that point. And beyond.

The story of electronic dating, text chats, video meetings, and love blossoming describes what must be weeks or months, rather than hours or years. It is a chance online swipe that turns to a deep connection; that doesn’t happen in an afternoon.

There is a moment of crisis as Tessa reaches Wright’s moon, followed by what we learn is some months before they again can connect in another critical moment, where they finally meet in real life.

Character: Tessa tells her story, we switch to Wright’s point of view as he fills in his backstory and in a clever twist suddenly the two paths intersect and we switch back to Tessa as she wraps up the narrative in her own words.

We learn, as we read from both points of view, that the love is genuine on both sides. Both are fully committed, both eventually reveal themselves to the other. They have shared their yearnings and desires across what we are repeatedly told is an unbridgeable divide.

And yet, here they are, looking into each other’s eyes in the same room.

In these three ways, Scarlet steps beyond the relatively straightforward structure of her other stories. It’s not hard to keep track of what’s going on, just pay attention. Oh, and you might also pick up some hints of what is to come. Just why do their video chats occasionally flicker and hesitate?

Spoilers ahead

I can’t discuss some of the deeper and more interesting questions Scarlet raises in this story without revealing some of the details of plot and character.

Here is your chance, gentle reader, to go and read it to get the full sense of the situation.

You may read the opening of the story on Medium. If you are a member, there is no difficulty, if not you get to read three stories a month for free. Go here.

You may buy the book through my Amazon affiliate link here.

You may buy directly from Scarlet Ibis James here.

OK. This is your final warning. After the next image, we’re into Spoiler Space.

I meet the book in real life - image by author

Deeper discussion

As we speak, I have an autographed copy in my possession. “To Britni from Scarlet,” the inscription reads and it has crossed our own all-but-unbridgeable divide from New York to Melbourne.

Much appreciated, Scarlet!

That Medium link given above is only for the first part of the story, it turns out, a response to a writing prompt published last September. Scarlet has refined the original story, filled it out, and taken us deeper and further.

And that, right there, is a testament to the power of giving a story time to grow and develop in the mind. Whether subconsciously or thought by thought, the details and the destination emerged for our reading pleasure.

Bear with me. This is going to take us into some dangerous territory.

Tessa’s visit to Wright’s moon reveals that nobody is there. She contacts him via her phone and he promptly hangs up, subsequently destroying all channels of communication, deleting his social media accounts etc.

Tessa is - naturally - heartbroken. She questions his existence. Was he even a natural person, she wonders, or just some sick AI program?

We then switch to Wright’s point of view:

I am right here, Tessa, I thought.

I had watched her since her return from the moon.

She had gone there to meet me in real life, catching me off guard. I wasn’t ready for that. I hung up in terror when she called. Then, I disconnected everything and let go of the entire deception.

I had to—I was not the person she wanted me to be, not the elaborate persona I had simulated.

Now, she was trying to find me—the real person behind her dream turned nightmare—the coward who had ghosted her.

Tessa hunts him down and he decides to come clean after a chance event reveals that he is very close to her physically. He is a 15-year-old boy living two apartments down.

In a dramatic move, Tessa takes up the story as she pounds on his door.

They gaze at each other and Tessa sees nothing of the confident astronaut she had fallen in love with, just a scared boy. It had all been a lie.

There were no answers here that could heal the gaping wound in my chest. No explanation that could undo the months I had spent loving someone who didn’t exist.

And yet, her love for the fictional astronaut had been real. The boy’s love for her - he assures us - likewise.

This is not something that can lead to a relationship. Tessa cannot love a child in the manner she had been yearning for. Physically, there is nothing there.

The reality of yearning

Scarlet explores something that is increasingly relevant in our world of AI. Every day we read of people developing one-sided relationships with AI characters, sometimes with devastating results: a 14-year-old boy - how ironic! - recently killed himself after becoming obsessed with an AI character.

As imagery and even video and speech becomes more and more realistic, the possibility of falling in love with a phantom AI persona itself becomes real, and the potential for devastating reactions once the deception becomes apparent equally real, if not assured.

Love is a kind of madness. We are not in control of ourselves as rational creatures. We do things - like travel to a distant moon, or hand over our savings - that may not be in our best interests.

Often it works out and the confidence, depth, and passion of love is returned, lasting decades.

And sometimes not.

Right now, love based on the deception of artificial intelligence seems like a most unlikely proposition for long-term romance. Chase the yearning down to the object of desire and there is nothing physical to touch, to hold, to embrace.

In Tessa’s case, she had fallen in love with the physical characteristics and personality of a handsome, confident, loving astronaut.

Scarlet’s story chills me. Love is real to us. It may be just a flood of hormones and obsessive behaviour on our part but it is real. We feel it deeply. We are on top of the world. We are lifted up. We are joyous and the world is brightened.

And yet. We don’t need AI to have this fall apart when the reality doesn’t match the desire. It might be a flawed partner, or cynical manipulation, or random chance.

How many love stories go wrong through disease or some tragic accident?

The pain is just as deep.

I worry about AI. “Wright” in this story may be just a boy consumed with his own hopeless passion but what happens when gangs command server farms of AI constructs fishing, hooking, and betraying real human beings?

Every word we write in conversation, every expression on a video call, every nuance of social media can be mined by artificial intelligence, subverting our best interests, trapping and twisting our emotions, our assets, our votes.

This story charts the trajectory of emotion. Tessa literally soars to the stars, impelled by love. She falls back to earth, she is devastated, she is drained and ultimately she walks away, damaged and defiant.

If there is another message here, it comes from the equally disappointed Sheldon/Wright character. If you want true love, be true in yourself.

Again, Scarlet explores love and yearning in a deep and thoughtful way. We feel the emotions of her characters, we see the potential, we are let down by reality.

This story is longer but still in just a few pages we are pulled in and our hearts are shaken about.

What other feelings await us in the rest of the book?

Britni