Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

The com lights up. Sally: Bradford, New Britannia, Earth? What the? How long has it been?
I stop rushing and let my AIde handle it.
“I’m supposing you’ve not heard-”
“You have reached the residence of Chris Utten. This is Alice, his AIde. Speak now to leave a message.”
“Hellfire and chips! You named it Alice? Answer the call, Chris…”
She waits. So do I.
“I’m sure you’re listening, but you always were more stubborn than me. I don’t have the advantage of being an obsessive waiting on a target.”
That’s unkind. Also true. My efforts to hide it… Probably made it obvious to everyone except me.
“Until I heard the word ‘Alice’, I hoped you’d moved on with your life. Now I suspect you’re doing quite well, but not as well as you could, because you’re always ready to rush across half of known space to be with a woman who never cared.”
What is this, interstellar pick on a hopeless romantic day?
She gives a soft laugh. I know that moment: looking down with a shrug as your vape runs dry at the exact moment you really needed a puff, or watching the tail lights of the last transport disappear as you make it to the pick-up point on a rainy night. You frown, give that laugh, and get on with your life like nothing happened. You’ve never known how much I envied that. Just roll with the inconvenience instead of spending a week working through every possible scenario for the day before the inconvenience, so it would have come out differently. At least I can stop those fixations trapping or distracting me these days.
“You’re wondering why I called, aren’t you? I hope you’re sitting down. Alice died in a shoot out with the police yesterday.”
I stagger back and fall onto the bed.
She what? She should have called… Why and how would she do that, you fool? Twenty-four years and I’m still an idiot.
“Seems like she’s been using the same trick she used on you to make herself a comfy living.”
Trick what? I never got close. Just loved her from afar, so sure she had a secret thing for me as well.
“Unfortunately for her, one of her marks was working with Pargilians. They spotted her telepathic touch.”
Telepathy?
“Which is why I’m calling. I think you should come back and lay claim to your absorption field technology. You know the one: you mentioned it to me when Renntech patented the same thing a couple of days before you intended to. You said there was no way they could have found out about it, so it must have been a freaky coincidence of parallel development.”
But if their source had been reading my mind as I reviewed the design and patent application…
“Turns out you got lucky. Her recent marks all died in suspicious accidents. That’s the other thing that gave her away once the police started investigating.”
Alice didn’t need to kill me. Just needed to ignore the infatuated inventor next door while eavesdropping on his mind. I wasn’t a threat, because I never suspected. How could I? Psionic abilities are still so incredibly rare among humans.
Sally sighs.
“Come home, Chris. It’s time to get on with your life. I won’t ask you to stay. Just come and claim what you never realised you missed.”
I sit up slowly. She hasn’t thought it through. If I go home, I’ll end up fixating on her.
Alice is gone, and I’m out here.
Which is exactly where I need to stay.