Amber Baird, Author

Originally published in PULP LIT MAG, Issue 1, page 123. Best of Net 2025 Finalist.

Stella explained that learning how to calculate redshift had a “catastrophic” effect on her spiritually. She had just started her astrophysics class and was ruminating on how, “everything’s math, dude, like all of it,” while we smoked. 

Later, she told us that the lemonade we’d just drank had been spiked with liquid LSD, and shortly thereafter, we redshifted too. 

We phased outdoors, where the people of the world were too real to be real, their textures screaming at us, sharpened in Photoshop 1666%. When Stella asked them questions, their expressions were exaggerated and cartoonish, their movements sudden in slow-motion.

“What’s your favorite number?” Stella thrust a vape pen as a microphone near the chin of a surly-looking high schooler of indeterminate gender wearing emo-revival eyeliner. 

“Uh, thirty-eight,” they said before leaning in and taking a hit. Stella held the button for them.

“Good for you, that’s your god now, baby,” Stella told them before skipping off into the downtown crowd.

Her worship of math grew stronger in the following weeks. We watched Pi and she scrawled the digits on me with liquid black eyeliner, the kind with a brush tip lending itself to a florid calligraphy technique. She grew frustrated when she reached the bottom of my feet and ran out of room. 

I asked her then if she wanted to get a second girlfriend so she could have more canvas to work on and she said she was seriously considering it.

We phased into the future and there were twelve of us, with Stella making thirteen. We were all covered in the numbers now except she’d graduated to a tattoo machine. We could be read sequentially, each with our unique barcode, our place in pi, our serial numbers. 

Usually, we called it a circle with the pun fully intended. Stella laughed when she called us her cult but we were too busy orbiting her to realize it wasn’t a postmodern joke. 

She was always the type to tell you exactly who she was, as improbable as it always seemed, like the time our junior year when she told me she was an alien over vegan sushi. “Mamabear told me when I was an itty bitty baby.” Her late mother had been diagnosed schizophrenic, but Stella thought that was an unfair label.

She wanted to let me know, she said, because she’d been thinking a lot and she’d come to the conclusion that the goal of her life from this point forward would be to go to her home world and find her people. With this, she popped a piece of tempura avocado into her mouth with her chopsticks. It wasn’t necessary for her to ask me to help, it was a given.

Stella founded Stella’s Stars officially the day after graduation. It was ostensibly a society of female scientists, joined together to encourage young women in STEM. At our evergreen campus outside Seattle, there was a summer camp for young adults, and we also hosted collegiate hackathons in November and April. We recruited the brightest and most ambitious from both of these programs. We would then guide them through finishing their studies, after which point they would work for us.  Each student made a commitment of 2 years of employment post-grad.  Of course, they were welcome to leave after that, but no one had.

Stella picked out, personally, the most rebellious of the groups, and recruited them for more intensive training. “We need disruptors on our side,” she told me. And so, one after one, we broke them and reformed them to be stronger, smarter, faster, and more attuned to Stella and the organization’s needs. Our specific roles were as varied as the number patterns we wore, but we all worked together to ensure that everything Stella wanted to be done got done, each a chain in the sequence.

A week before the end of it all, Iris, a chemist in her first year of employment, stopped me in the shared kitchen amongst the living quarters where we kept our alcoholic fizzy water and bottles of Soylent, separate from the institutional version designed to serve our meals downstairs.

I was minding my own business waiting for the electric kettle to boil when she explained to me, “You don’t understand. If she does this, it’s going to destroy everything on this side of the divide.” She stretched out the words, speaking extra loud and slow because she knew I graduated with a B.A. in General Studies.

Steam billowed out of my cup as I poured the hot water over my bag of chamomile. “I think that’s conjecture.”

“Look, if you didn’t want smart people to tell you when you’re being stupid, why’d you recruit us?” She clearly thought this was some kind of checkmate but I just offered her a shrug before turning and leaving.

Her eyes on my back, I realized I’d left the cup of tea on the counter, but there was nothing I could do about that now. The universe had spoken.

When I returned to our quarters, Stella consoled me for my loss of beverage, leading me by my hand to the conversation pit where the others sat waiting. “That Iris is such a downer,”

“Such a downer,” said all eleven of the women waiting for us, in unison.

I disrobed before slinking into my spot in the sequence, relaxing into the deep purple couch, its smooth fabric against my back feeling like home.

Stella stood in the center in all her glory. The lights were designed to make her glow, but really they just played up her natural shine.

Truthfully, I never really believed Stella was an extraterrestrial, but I couldn’t prove that she was wrong and I had no interest in going against her. She was our sun, and I was her first planet. Wrong or right, Stella was destined for glory and I was going to hold on to her rocket ship for as long as I could.