I haven’t written anything proper in a while…so I hope you don’t mind this extremely random and most weird short story.

Her eyes rested longingly on that last lonely crepe. It was sitting oh so daintily on the faux silver platter, it was adorned with the perfect amount of powdered sugar and it called her name. True, it had been sitting there for a few hours, so it surely would taste of stale flour and dried out berries, but she didn’t care. Her breakfast had been a sad half of a grapefruit. Not even the better half. She almost felt tempted to just grab the crepe and stuff it in her mouth, but then…then she’d get yelled at by the makeup artist and the director and Tom and…it just wouldn’t be worth it. Anna sighed. Sometimes being a movie star just wasn’t worth it. This was one of those times.

Of course, being a star had its perks. She didn’t have to do her own makeup, for one thing. Her outer face sat pristine, carefully plastered onto what she thought of as her “Saturday night” face. Saturday night, of course – being the only night she ever had to herself anymore. This latest shoot was a brutal, six days a week, fourteen hours a day. Saturdays were nominally off-days, but they’d been working those lately too. She still made sure to excuse herself early and make her way to her condo.

And then, for at least a few hours, she curled up in bed with a cup of cocoa, read her current fantasy novel and pretended she was a normal person. Her condo was her last remaining stronghold against the outside world. Her agent wasn’t even allowed in. Her condo was small by her peers’ standards, but it was hers. It protected her from the schemes of the paparazzi and the bloids. It sat in Los Angeles, polluted and tarnished by the city air. Yet it was hers. Sometimes she would look at her face in the mirror and wonder what others saw in her. She saw a woman that looked increasingly dirty and stretched. She’d wash her face again and again, trying to uncover the small girl that used to peer at her out of the mirror’s depths. Where did she go?

When Anna was five, she had wanted to be an astronaut, traveling to the farthest reaches of space. Her life goal was to be the first person on Mars. This was back in the days when mankind still explored space and sent out probes every few months. Nowadays, no country bothered spending money on space exploration, deeming it an “extravagant and wasteful proposition”, as the prime minister of Scotland had said in his latest rant on the floor of the UN.
Once though, Anna had dreamed of traveling in space. She had imagined braving the silent void, traveling through the vast reaches of space. And now she sat on a set in Los Angeles, filming yet another ponderous period piece. Surrounded by loud-mouthed executives and frantic cameramen and causing a mild panic every time she smiled. She was sick of it. It paid the bills.

Anna’s eyes darted toward the crepe again. She seriously wanted it. Anna sighed loudly and ran her fingers through her carefully arranged hair. Shoot would be starting soon though – once Tom got out of makeup. How it took him an hour longer to get through makeup, she had no idea…unless it had something to do with his preponderance of wrinkles.

And as her mind thought of the wrinkles on her co-star’s face, she thought back to simpler times, back before she knew what paparazzi and co-concentrators and restraining orders were. Back before she had to stare into a co-star’s face and pretend she had chemistry with him. Back when wrinkles signified wormholes in time and space….

She floated through a rusty starship corridor, her suit nearly catching on a protruding gauge. This mission was a simple one, but it would end quickly enough if she tore her suit. As Anna made her way through to the far control pod, she looked back for a second, satisfied she’d not been followed by any…unwanted presence. The silence stretched loud in her ears and she smiled as she thought of what her father would say if he could see her now. He had always told her that she’d amount to nothing more than a shiny broompusher and yet here she was, a rogue starpilot exploring a derelict freighter a hundred light years from Earth. Not too bad for a farm girl from Iowa.

Anna pushed open the last door that sat between her and the cockpit. It swung heavily, hindered by the rust that had accumulated over the centuries. And then…she forgot about the door and the rust and she forgot to think much of anything at all. The ship’s control lights were ominously lit, not dull and dead as they should have been. And there were words swift scrolling across the main console in a far-ancient language. She was not alone on this ship after all. There was an intelligence with her. A machine intelligence. She was not alone. The lights blinked at her in a mildly threatening fashion, and then her eyes glanced more closely at the computer screen. The script had changed to a more familiar one.

WHO ARE YOU TO DISTURB?

Anna reluctantly touched her fingers to the dust stained keyboard and tapped in almost-forgotten patterns.

I COME IN PEACE. I COME TO EXPLORE. I COME TO LEARN. I COME TO SEE.

YOU ARE HUMAN. YOU ARE NOT WELCOME.

I COME ALONE. I MEAN NO HARM. I COME TO SEE.

The lights of the console whirred in an almost hesitant fashion, as if the machine mind was thinking, its mind tracing long unused pathways in its circuits. New words finally flashed upon the console, slowly.

THEN SEE.

The ship began a gentle yaw to her left, showing her another portion of star studded space through the cockpit view screen. And there was a flash. Anna blinked. The sky was still full of stars. Yet, she had never seen such patterns. Before her mind could comprehend the fact that she’d traveled a thousand thousand light years in a millisecond, before it became clear that she was now stranded in deep space with a likely hostile machine intelligence as her only companion…before all that, she brought her hand up to her mouth and gasped. Stars wheeled across the sky in front of her, galaxies pinwheeling in front of her eyes. Stardust filled the void. Space was not empty here, it was heaving, full of life and beauty. Anna struggled to understand. Stars painted the canopy of space as if strewn there by a master painter. Nebulas arrayed themselves in elegant rows and began dancing to the song of the stars of heaven. Anna did not understand. There was so much beauty. Why? Anna put her hand down on the rusty computer console and sighed in longing and awe.

And then the sky crackled, softly.

“Let’s go, people!”

Anna jerked upright. Had she been…dreaming? Tom was striding toward the columned area they were scheduled to shoot their first scene, a flirty rendezvous of some sort, Anna remembered. Anna sighed. What had been in her dream? It had been…beautiful.

“We’re on a schedule,” that annoying voice barked. Carefully, Anna rose from her chair and walked towards the camera strewn pavement.

Anna set her face in the same mask that had graced a thousand magazine covers and smiled a gorgeous pink-lipped smile, casting one more look at the lonesome crepe.