Marianne in an Unlit Bar on the Outer Curve of Human Space

My strongest memories of Marianne are all edges—a hand grasping from the wrong side of a kilometer-high drop; an icy smile as security drags me away for interrogation; a mock kiss blown through a crystal cryopod.

She’s sitting in the back of the bar. The rays of the triple suns don’t reach far enough, so she’s half in the dark with threefold shadows hiding her face.

Marianne is presenting as female—she always does, it’s one of her eccentricities. I’m female now too, though the previous time I was male. Before that we were on Algexia, where they don’t have discrete genders, yet Marianne managed to be female there, too. How they loved her, how they kept asking her to sing in the plazas on top of the City of Trees!

Her name was Em’ryeeyan then—she’s been Ymarrielle, Mzaranth, M-9N, but she always cycles back to Marianne eventually.

I change my gender, my sex, my skin, eyes, hair, subcutaneous weaponry, but I’m always Luca. I don’t sing.

“Hey, Luca,” she says, as if we’d just seen each other a few days ago in this same bar, instead of five hundred years ago and eleven light years spinward.

“Hey, Marianne.” 

I try to match her airy tone. Her smirk tells me I’ve failed. Sweat beads the back of my neck around my main port.

I’ve survived through wars, machine uprisings, grey goo incursions, recursive ontological paradoxes, runaway capitalism, and other disasters of every size, shape, and smell—as a diplomat, philosopher-assassin, warrior princess, psychic spy, indentured infantry—yet my hardest task is always this: meeting Marianne in some rundown town on a planet or station somewhere every half millenium.

“Did the fighting catch up with you?”

“The Three-Systems Collapse?”

She smiles. “Is that what they’re calling it?” 

“I hopped on a Syndicate coldship and got out as things started heating up.”

She grimaces. “I hate when they defrost you and blue mucus leaks out of your orifices.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Nobody wants a blue hole.”

It’s an old joke and the pun only works in a language that died long ago in a different arm of the galaxy. She’s polite enough to gift me a small, catlike grin.

Like many humans these days, Marianne looks more feline than simian. Her plush skin has subtle, orange stripes and her pointed ears twitch as they scan the room. 

“This is…nice,” she lies—I’m not sure if she means the rundown, odorous, low-level bar or just the fact of our being together.

“Yes, it is,” I lie as well.

Marianne was modded before me. The nanites in her plasmatic and interstitial fluids keep her alive, unaging, and healthy, but they drift over millenia and their functionality degrades. I can see it in her eye movements, in the slight droop of her whiskers, in the split second she takes before speaking. 

I was augmented a century after her in the same Antarctic lab with better tech—my nanites are self-correcting and don’t drift. They synced hers to mine so when we meet, every five-hundred years or so, I can recalibrate her system.

I’ve chosen to help her so far, even though the process takes its toll on my nanites as they absorb some of her chaos. I feel it in my tissues, in the pain behind my eyes when I wake up, in the effort to fully stretch my spine.

She’s humming a tune I don’t know, looking straight ahead as if waiting for me to say something.

My warmest memories of Marianne are fleeting and distant—watching birds dash under a botanic asteroid’s cupola; a walk along the banks of a newly-terraformed river; laughing at solstice holograms in a city orbiting a gas giant; the sounds she made the single time we had sex; the way I felt. 

But that is our ancient past—Marianne long ago grew tired of courting my favor or pretending to even like me. Over the last seven millenia, she’s settled on a more direct approach.

“So,” she says, “will you do it?”

I smile, grimly satisfied. Marianne’s question, and the cold, flat way she asked it, has just settled any last doubts as to whether meeting her here is an act of kindness or spite. 

I order two shots from the floating servitor. We wait in silence until they arrive. I down mine in a single gulp and gaze for a few seconds around us, trying to create a memory of this place, this moment.

I turn back to the one person in known human space who I love yet do not need to tell her that this is the last time she will see the one person she needs yet does not love. The bar is so quiet we can hear the local insect analogs buzzing their syncopated beat. Marianne downs her drink, gives me a final, sardonic smile, tips her head slightly, then leaves.

I order one last shot.

© 2026 Rodrigo Culagovski

Rodrigo Culagovski (he/him/él) is a Chilean architect, designer, and web developer. He has previously published in Escape Pod,  Flash Fiction Online, Nature, Levar Burton Reads, khōréō among others. Find him on Bluesky as @culagovski.net.