Sector 7 Rendezvous

I should have known something was wrong when she ordered a drink that would dissolve my esophageal lining.

The notification had pinged through my neural interface at 1847 hours, ship time: New match on MeetMeSpace! Sarah_Earthgirl wants to meet tonight at Oxygen’s End, Sector 7. Her profile picture showed smooth pink skin. She had two forward-facing optical sensors. That peculiar arrangement of keratin strands humans called “hair” was also present. Perfect genetic compatibility indicators. Standard bipedal locomotion. All the markers that screamed safe reproduction potential to my hormone-addled cortex.

What a fool I was.

I spent three cycles crafting my own human persona—Marcus_SpaceEngineer. I borrowed images from deceased crew manifests. I also fabricated a backstory about growing up on Luna Colony. The morphic field generator I’d jury-rigged from stolen med-bay components would hold for exactly 4.7 hours before my true form began bleeding through at the cellular level. Plenty of time for first-date protocols.

Oxygen’s End squatted in the station’s underbelly like a chromium tumor, all neon arteries and synthetic atmosphere. The air tasted of recycled dreams and industrial lubricant. I checked my reflection in a shop window—still human, still convincing. Two eyes instead of seven. Skin instead of carbonated plating. The neural dampeners were holding my pheromone output at barely detectable levels.

She was already there when I arrived, occupying a corner booth with her back to the wall. Smart. I recognized the defensive positioning immediately—prey animal behavior, though I couldn’t yet classify which species. Her hair was darker than in the photos. The way she held her shoulders hinted at internal structural modifications. I couldn’t identify these modifications.

“Marcus?” Her voice carried harmonics that made my gill slits flutter beneath their synthetic covering.

“Sarah.” I slid into the booth, noting how she flinched when our knees brushed. “You look… different from your pictures.”

A pause. A calculation behind those allegedly human eyes. “The lighting here is strange.”

The bartender approached with the weary shuffle of someone who’d seen every possible combination of biology and desperation. He was genuine human stock, probably third-generation station-born. I ordered synthhol, standard concentration. She ordered something called a Quantum Combustion that made the air shimmer with barely contained radiation.

That should have been my first clue.

But loneliness makes idiots of us all, doesn’t it? Three years of deep space assignment. I watched human crew members pair off. All the while, I maintained my careful masquerade. I spent three years wondering. I questioned if anyone in this cold metal universe could accept me. I wondered if someone could see what I really was beneath the borrowed flesh.

“So,” I said, fighting to keep my voice box from clicking, “tell me about Earth. I’ve been off-world so long, I forget what real seasons feel like.”

Her smile was perfect. Too perfect. The kind of symmetry that suggested either genetic modification or entirely different facial architecture. “Oh, Earth. Yes. Very… seasonal. Lots of… weather patterns.”

We talked in circles for twenty minutes, each trying to extract concrete details while revealing nothing ourselves. She claimed to work in “agricultural distribution systems.” I insisted I was a “thermal dynamics specialist.” Both were obvious fabrications. However, we maintained the dance. The alternative was admitting we were both predators stalking the same prey.

The alcohol helped. Or hurt. With my modified metabolism, I could never be sure which. The bar grew louder, smokier, more desperate. Station singles night in full swing—humans and near-humans and carefully-disguised Others all playing the same game of evolutionary roulette.

“I have to ask,” she said suddenly, leaning forward. Her perfume carried traces of sulfur and something else, something that made my implanted adrenal glands spike with recognition. “Are you actually human?”

My morphic field stuttered. For a nanosecond, my true face flickered into visibility. It showed compound eyes and mandible structure. The feeding tentacles I’d kept carefully retracted all evening were visible. She saw it. I knew she saw it because her own disguise wavered in response. It revealed something with entirely too many teeth. The skin shifted color like living oil.

We stared at each other across the table. Two monsters who’d been hunting the same lie.

“Zephyrian?” I asked.

“Thought you were human,” she said. Her voice was changing, losing the careful human cadences. Gaining harmonics that spoke directly to nervous systems, bypassing the rational mind entirely. “Three cycles of deep scan analysis said human.”

“Metamorphic cephalopod,” I admitted. “Your pheromone signature read completely human on the bio-scanners.”

We sat in silence while the bar’s chaos swirled around us. We were two apex predators who’d spent weeks perfecting our disguises. We aimed to hunt the same prey. In the end, we discovered we’d been hunting each other all along.

“Well,” she said finally, “this is awkward.”

I laughed. I actually laughed, which was a sound my human voice box wasn’t designed for. It produced a noise like grinding gears. This noise made several nearby patrons look our way nervously. “We’re both idiots.”

“Catastrophically stupid,” she agreed. Her skin was cycling through colors now—embarrassment registering as deep purples and frustrated oranges. “Do you know how much energy I burned maintaining mammalian body temperature for this?”

“Do you know how painful it is to keep my feeding apparatus retracted for three hours?”

We ordered another round. Then another. The conversation shifted, became easier. Without the pretense of humanity, we could actually talk. She told me about her homeworld’s chromatic communication systems. I explained the social hierarchy of hive-mind governance. She laughed at my description of the mating rituals of my species. Apparently, they were remarkably similar to her own. This was true if you adjusted for the difference in appendage count.

“We’re both so far from home,” she said eventually. The bar was winding down, station night-cycle approaching. Our disguises had long since collapsed entirely, and nobody seemed to care. Just two more aliens in a universe full of aliens, pretending to be something they weren’t.

“Maybe,” I said, surprised by my own boldness, “we don’t need to be.”

She considered this. Her chromatophores shifted to something I didn’t recognize but somehow understood anyway—cautious optimism mixed with the particular shade of loneliness that transcends species boundaries.

“I should probably mention,” she said, “my reproductive cycle involves temporary paralysis of my partner’s nervous system.”

“Coincidentally,” I replied, “mine requires ritualistic consumption of genetic material.”

We looked at each other. Two predators who’d discovered something more dangerous than hunting: understanding.

“Second date?” she asked.

“Definitely,” I said. “Though maybe we should meet somewhere with better medical facilities.”

We left Oxygen’s End together. We were two shapeshifters who’d learned that the greatest lie wasn’t pretending to be human. It was pretending to be alone. Behind us, the bar’s neon signs flickered against the station’s hull, advertising false promises to the lonely and desperate.

But sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you find someone whose desperation matches your own exactly.

Sometimes the lies we tell reveal more truth than we ever intended.

Sometimes catfish swim in the same waters.