2026 Monthly Story Challenge #5

Allure (Wordcount 6763)

By Jayde Holmes

cw: Domestic Violence, violence towards women and LGBT+ characters, suicide, animal neglect (but the animal gets better)

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Warning! This account is an information hazard! The revelations contained within will cause psychological changes in the human mind that may endanger the reader. I initially wanted to bury all this information, but I soon realised that would be futile. If humanity survives the current crises: if anyone at all is alive this time next month, then Allure will be re-discovered. I must leave a warning. Consider carefully if you wish to continue reading.

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Aisha Mandle was a physics professor by occupation, who spent her free time pouring over NASA’s TESS data looking for exoplanets. Her wife, Audrey Daily, was a chemistry professor with a polite interest with Aisha’s hobby, who did fundraising for a charity that restores Bilby habitat. They owned a modest house in the outer suburbs that was pushing their budget, and a ragdoll cat named Plushie, who was as lovable as his name suggested.

I am told Aisha made her discovery on a lazy Saturday afternoon in the couple’s cramped gaming room. Plushie was sprawled out on Aisha’s lap as she sorted through the TESS spectral data, whilst Audrey was stationed on the opposite desk playing Helldivers. Aisha detected a small exoplanet around a star that I of course will not identify just as Audrey started a match. By the time Audrey had finished the mission and could come look, Aisha had become enchanted by her discovery.

She had no information then on the exo-planet’s size, composition, or orbital period. She didn’t know if it was rocky, or tidally locked, or even if it was alone in its solar system. Still, she had spent almost five minutes re-reading the numbers that indicated a dip in the star’s brightness, her leg shaking so much that Plushie had been forced off her lap, before Audrey could get away from the bugs long enough to turn around and look at her screen.

“Oh my god, my wife just found another planet” Audrey had said to her friends after fist bumping Aisha. One of Audrey’s gaming friends remembers that quote, because he asked what game Aisha was playing, causing Audrey to give him a lesson on exo-planet hunting and citizen-scientist programs. Audrey left the session after only that one mission so they could celebrate the new discovery, so when I got around to interviewing her crew, they didn’t have much information for me. There are only two pieces of pertinent information I got from them.

The first is their description of Aisha’s voice, which they heard muffled through Audrey’s headset. There was nothing of note about it when she first announced that she’d found an exo-planet. She had seemed excited, but that is only to be expected when finding a new planet. As the mission went on though, Aisha could be heard in the background. Nothing she said could be made out by the gamers, and Audrey didn’t repeat anything, however they all report Aisha becoming more excitable as the mission went on. I have never known Aisha Mandle to be a particularly excitable person. ‘Stoic’, ‘wallflower’, and ‘quiet’ are more fitting descriptors, and even knowing the significance of her find, I cannot imagine her being loud enough to disturb Audrey’s game.   

What I find more disturbing though, is that despite talking to each member of Audrey’s crew separately, they all told me they wanted to go to space. This is a diverse group of people with gaming their only shared interest, but all of them reported that their interest in space exploration has suddenly spiked. They attribute this to the recent moon mission, which is plausible, but that was not long after Aisha’s discovery. They also all report dreams of stars and shadows like my own.

I must stress that Audrey is not a physicist or an astronomer. Whilst she understands the basics of planet hunting from Aisha, she, like me, needs to be walked through the data for it to be anything but numbers. However, she said that when she first looked at Aisha’s screen, with all those numbers and charts showing the dip in the brightness, she felt the exoplanet. Those were her exact words. She told me that she couldn’t understand anything on the screen, but the numbers made her happy. Aisha told me her wife’s eyes lit up as she read. Not out of polite interest or excitement for Aisha, but because the data was good. It was comforting. Neither of them wanted to stop looking at it.

Aisha confessed that she felt unable to look away from the screen that night. Doing so only became tolerable after Audrey suggested that maybe one day the space program could reach this alluring planet.

I never saw the data for Aisha’s exo-planet, so I do not know how they felt seeing it.

I am so glad I don’t know what a direct experience of it feels like. Whatever god there is out there, thank-you for not letting them show it to me.

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My involvement in this affair started a week after Aisha’s discovery. They invited me over for drinks and boardgames one evening. Alone.

I’m an admin assistant at the university, with absolutely no expertise in exo-planets, human cognition or philosophy that could have helped them make sense of their find. I met the couple at an event for queer staff at the university, and we bonded over our shared experiences as lesbians disowned by religious parents, and similar taste in games and TV shows. They trusted me.

They also believed I had ‘flexible thinking’. Meaning I watched horror movies and read SCP Foundation fics a lot. My administration skills, as well as my years of experience juggling the University’s social media accounts were also essential criteria for what they had planned.

I felt as if I was at a job interview while we played Uno. Plushie sat on my lap just as they were starting to explain what was going on. As I rubbed under his chin, I found two massive chunks of matted hair that his humans had missed. Explanations were delayed as we all fussed over Plushie, and Audrey set me up on the front veranda with a drink as the two of them de-knotted Plushie’s mane.

Aisha and Audrey came out with their own drinks, and the mood shifted as the sun went down. They told me about what they were calling The Alluring Planet, describing the strange way seeing the data made them feel. A bunch of moths were gathering around the light above us, so I made the obvious comparison.

“We’re smarter than bugs” Aisha had said. “But yes, I guess that is what’s happening. Someone has found a way to make a beacon by triggering feelings.”

I didn’t believe them at that stage. Yet I still declined their offer to show me the data. As I said, I watch horror movies. The couple decided that it was probably good to have an unaffected advisor in this matter and didn’t push the matter. We moved on to what I thought at the time was a change of topic, but quickly realised was a continuation of the interview.

We talked about current affairs. About the brewing war and the madman in the White House. About all the little ways our way of life was eroding away.

“What we need” Aisha had said, “is a common goal for humanity to work towards. Something peaceful that will require so much effort and resources that we won’t be able to make war anymore. I wish the moon missions could do that.”

I agreed with Aisha, and then when I saw the looks the two gave me, I saw the trap.

“You think if we all want to go to the lamp planet, we’ll work together to get there, don’t you?” I asked.

They laid out their whole plan for me then, revealing another key reason they’d invited me. They knew I understood the precipice humanity balanced on, and I’d already told them I was afraid. The couple believed that their Alluring Planet was humanity’s salvation. It had a power that was beyond nature, and its effect on humans was undeniable. Our whole species would surely unite and work towards reaching the planet if everyone could see it.

The trick was making sure everyone saw the data at once. Aisha and Audrey were self-aware enough to realise how crazy they sounded when talking about their discovery. They knew people who hadn’t felt the planet would try to protect the masses from information contamination.

Aisha asked me again if I wanted to see it, and I again declined. Even though barely an hour had passed since their last offer, they seemed a lot less accepting this time.

The next time I referred to their planet as Lamp, Audrey got angry with me. She insisted it was “The Alluring Planet.” Of course, being Australians, we did shorten it to ‘Allure’ by the time I went home.

The night left me unsettled, even though I was unconvinced of Allure’s power. They’d both seemed offended by me calling Allure ‘Lamp’, even though it’s one of the mildest jokes I have ever made with them. That outrage, and the fervour they’d had whilst talking about Allure was weird. As I was trying to work out why bothered me so much, I realised they’d reminded me of my parents when they’d spoken of hellfire and the power of prayer.

From Aisha, such religious talk might have made sense. She did have a rather spiritual side. From Audrey though? Who had almost broken up with Aisha over magic crystals and who had gone into mourning when Dawkins went TERF? Hearing her act like the word ‘lamp’ was blasphemous got more disturbing the more I thought about it.

However, when I go home, I began scrolling. I saw the news, and the sabre-rattling on display was much more disturbing than anything I’d heard at the Mandle-Daily house.

I went to bed that night hoping that Allure was real and could do what Aisha said it could.  

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Whilst I didn’t initially believe in Allure, I could not get the thought of it out of my mind. Aisha hadn’t told me if the planet was in the habitable zone, or if it was even solid, but I imagined it Earth-like. As better than Earth. In my daydreams, Allure became a paradise world where humanity could start anew and we’d all be safe.

But soon Aisha and Audrey began acting weird. They would skip their classes with no warning, and whenever their students managed to get graded assignments back, their marks seemed random. Students also complained that their lectures were either a robotic reading from a textbook, or incoherent ramblings. The couple’s conversations with colleagues and friends were not much better, and both grew more dishevelled in appearance with each public outing.

They attempted again to rope me into their plans to spam the Allure data to as many people at once as possible. Any attempts to redirect the conversation, or to talk about more Earthly matters, proved futile. Every deflection I made seemed to make them angrier at me, despite their assurances otherwise.

For mutual friends who did not know about Allure, conversation on any topic with either one of the pair proved impossible. Our circle was worried about them, but I resisted the urge to tell them about Allure.

Even back then, I wanted to tell everyone I met about Allure. I didn’t because I knew it made Aisha and Audrey seem insane.

A month after being told about Allure, I heard through the grapevine that Audrey had been accused of stealing funds from the bilby charity. I felt compelled to act, to intervene in this madness. I went to see them after class.

I was surprised at how happy they were to see me. They let me into their house, offered me a drink, and then acted shocked when I began ripping into them. I called them out on failing their students and worrying their friends. I called Audrey a thief and a lair. I’d given her so much money to help the bilbies in the past that I was too angry to be gentle with friends I thought were having a breakdown.

I called Allure an ‘insane obsession’ and Aisha screamed at me to get out of her ‘fucking house’ so loud the neighbours poked their heads over the fence.

I stormed to their front door, ready to slam it on them and our friendship forever, but I stopped as I realised we’d been lacking a familiar presence, and dread washed over me.

“Where’s Plushie?” I asked.

Aisha’s face snapped back into something familiar. Audrey gasped. They both ran deeper into the house, their anger at me forgotten. I followed them all the way to the laundry.

“What have you done to Plushie?” I demanded.

“He was getting in the way” Aisha said. “We were making a video for the Allure release, and he kept getting in the way, so we shut him in the laundry.”

“How long ago was that?” Audrey asked.

With shaking hands, Aisha opened the laundry door, and I repeated Audrey’s question. Neither one of them could answer as we were hit with the stench of a long neglected litterbox.

“Meow?”

We heard Plushie’s cry from the dark room and were all overcome with relief. Except he didn’t run out, and we had to search through the laundry, climbing over piles of clothes and fighting not to gag. Plushie kept crying, and I glimpsed two overflowing litterboxes. My blood boiled as I counted the visible turds, realising that they’d been neglecting Plushie long before they shut him in and forgot about him.

Audrey found him under a shelf and dragged him out. He was panting, and his fluffy back legs had crap caked into his fur. Aisha was hyperventilating, muttering ‘how?’ over and over. I helped them get Plushie back to his food bowl, which they topped up. Next to the bowl was a fancy pet water fountain, which we assume Plushie only ever used when no-one was watching, since Aisha and Audrey never saw him drink.

He spent an entire minute lapping up the water as was watched.  

“I can’ believe we forgot about Plushie” Audrey said, her face streaked with tears. “Aisha, what’s happening?”

“It was just a couple of days ago” Aisha said. “And we had more important things to worry about.”

“More important that Plushie?” Audrey snapped.

Aisha watched Plushie, who finished his drink and then looked around and hissed, as if the choice between eating and trying to hide was too much for him.

“I love Plushie” Aisha said. “I, I love Plushie?”

I heard the hesitation in her voice. As I’d watched them cry and fuss over Plushie, they’d almost seemed like my friends again. But hearing the way Aisha seemed to question what had once been one of her defining character traits, I blew up at them again. Asked them if Plushie’s neglect was enough to show them that the Allure obsession had gone too far.

They both cried, and I thought they’d seen the light. Unfortunately, the only light they cared about was hundreds of light years away. Aisha screamed at me. I won’t go into the specifics of our argument, because I came away from that night hating Aisha, and I don’t want that to be the way I present her to you. Before all this started, most times I’d seen Plushie he’d been in Aisha’s arms, cradled like a baby.

The gist of her argument was that some things important were enough to sacrifice anyone or anything for. We debated that topic, with none of the restraint of a proper debate. Aisha cited a recent city that had been bombed, and threats that had been exchanged between at least five different countries. In turn, I cited Plushie, who had finished with his food and was cautiously moving in to rub against Aisha.

“Aisha” Audrey said. “We need to clean Plushie up. This must be stressing him out.”

“You’re right” Aisha said, her face softening and turning to me as she nodded. “I think you are too. We’ve been so busy we’ve really messed things up for everyone around us. We need to make sure we can still take care of Plushie. And ourselves. If people think knowledge of Allure will make you stop caring about everything, they’ll stop it from spreading.”

I wasn’t too happy about that last part, but the rest sounded encouraging. They began the work of cleaning up Plushie and shaving off the soiled fur on his legs and tail. They suggested I leave while they cleaned him. I almost did, but my unease made me turn around and offer to mind Plushie for a few days instead.  For a second, I thought they would protest, but after looking at each other Aisha reluctantly nodded, and Audrey agreed it would be best for me to look after him for a few days. Just until they put themselves back together, to use her words.

I returned home that night with a crying Plushie in his carrier. He was mostly clean, but Aisha had given me their pet groomer’s business card and some money to book him an appointment. He came with all kinds of cat paraphernalia, plus two dirty shirts from his humans.

I put Plushie’s bed and the shirts next to a window that had a good view of a grevillea that would be popular with local birds during the day. Plushie spent all night at the window crying. I patted him and reminded him that his mothers had promised to come and check in on him tomorrow.

The following night he was in the same spot crying. They hadn’t come.

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Audrey did eventually come to visit me and Plushie. One afternoon about two weeks or so after I’d taken him in, she showed up at my front door looking stone faced. We’d all been looking a bit like that today. There’d been an assassination in the Middle East overnight, and many countries in Europe were passing laws that screamed ‘we are preparing for total war’.

               I told myself, and Audrey when she later asked, that the chaos here on Earth had kept me too busy to think about Allure. That was a lie. Whenever I’d found myself stressed out by these events, I’d turned to daydreams about a beautiful planet covered in forests and waterfalls, with two moons and a Saturn-like ringed planet in the sky. I’d convinced myself I was just imagining some calming imagery, but now I wish I’d been honest with myself.

               We made small talk in the doorway, until Plushie bounded down the hallway, his massive far coat bouncing as he ran to Audrey. He’d been settling in well here and loved both me and my girlfriend, but he still went looking for Aisha and Audrey. He reached Audrey and stood up on his hind legs as he rubbed against her. She burst into tears and a smile as she scooped him up and cuddled him.

               I had to let her in after that. As we walked back down the hallway, I heard a clinking sound and noticed she carried a canvas bag with at least two bottles of wine. I got us settled in the loungeroom and asked if she was here to take Plushie home.

               Audrey flinched as if I’d punched her in the gut. She bit her lip and shook her head. I had expected her to say yes; I’d heard that her and Aisha were both teaching their classes adequately and their personal appearance matched their previous standards. I said as much to Audrey, but she just kept shaking her head and patting the ragdoll on her lap. She asked for wine glasses and poured us both drinks before explaining.

               “I need to keep telling myself I have to act normal or else we’ll lose our income and house and no-one will take us seriously when we reveal Allure” Audrey said. “Not constantly, but often enough that it scares me. I think Plushie is better off here until we can both shake that. I miss him so much, but I’m not going to risk neglecting him again.”

               I told her I understood, and that I was happy to look after Plushie until the obsession went away. I asked if Aisha felt the same way and she flinched again.

               “I think Aisha does need to tell herself to act normal constantly” Audrey admitted.

               We drained the first wine bottle as Audrey explained in more detail the ongoing effects of Allure. She didn’t understand the data she saw, but she knew there was a planet out there, and seeing something that represented it had done something to her brain. To Aisha though, the data hadn’t been some mysterious representation. She had seen Allure as well as any human could, and that data had provided her with clear knowledge about it.

               “I don’t even think it’s a planet anymore” Audrey had explained. “I think it’s the physical manifestation of something that exists mostly on some other plane of existence. One that we can touch with our minds. We weren’t looking directly at any light from that solar system, just what a computer made of that light. We haven’t encountered anything physical from Allure, so it must be operating beyond the laws of our universe in order to have any effect on us. I think knowing about it forces some sort of connection, and since Aisha knows more, its able to burrow into her mind even deeper than mine or Mandeep’s.”

               “Mandeep from the library?” I asked, prompting Audrey to tell the story about when they’d made printouts of the data. Aisha had wanted to put them up around the house for inspiration. The university librarian, Mandeep, had helped Aisha with the printer and in the process had glimpsed some Allure data. She had been told simply that it was some ‘physics stuff’ for Aisha’s students and had been satisfied with that explanation. However not long after that encounter our colleagues began noticing a change in Mandeep. She’d seemed restless, distracted. She told some friends that she was desperate to travel, but when pressed she couldn’t say where she wanted to go.

               This was not completely new information to me. I’d been the one to organise Mandeep’s sick leave after she called me and claimed she was having ‘some sort of mental breakdown.’ I also knew that Mandeep had returned to work earlier this week, and as far as Audrey and I could tell she seemed mostly back to her old self, besides seeming distracted a lot of the time.

               Perhaps this report about Mandeep caused the first cracks in my denial, because I had asked Audrey if she thought it would be possible for Allure to take hold of someone who hadn’t seen the evidence, but who knew about the discovery.

               “Are you obsessing over it?” she asked.

               “No” I lied.

               “Then it shouldn’t be an issue” she said. “Still, I think… I think…”

               She took a gulp of wine and tried again, but it was a struggle for her to say the words “I don’t think people should know.” I didn’t time how long it took her to get the words out, but it felt like I spent a long time watching her hyperventilate as she psyched herself up to say it.

               I asked what changed, and she picked up Plushie and hugged him tight.

               “I love Plushie so much” Audrey had explained. “I still do, but it’s like now there is this Allure wall that stands between me and Plushie. And you and Aisha and the environment and everyone and everything else I care about. I only see other things through gaps in the Allure wall. It is more important than anything else and I fucking hate it. I just want to go back to what I was like before we found it, but it’s like my thoughts can’t stray too far away from Allure, and when I do concentrate on other things, I need to justify it.”

               We both drank more wine, and I let her continue. I am of course paraphrasing her rant, but her wall metaphor has stuck with me.

               “Allure is powerful enough to make everyone work together to get to it” she continued. “I’m confident it’ll stop us from blowing each other up, but if we don’t care about anything else then I don’t want to know what we’ll do to get to it. The natural world won’t help us get to Allure, so we won’t protect it. And what if slavery or eugenics proves the most effective way to get there? If everyone knew about Allure, they’d do whatever it took to get there. You’d see the fiercest human rights advocates supporting slavery if it seemed necessary for Allure, I assure you. I forgot about Plushie and almost stole thousands of dollars from the Bilby Trust. If you’d told me I’d ever do stuff like that, I’d have never believed you.”

               “But it broke your heart when you saw Plushie all alone in the laundry” I’d reminded her.

               “Not enough. And then once he was out of the house, I almost forgot about him again. And Aisha has to be forced to care about him. About anything. Allure has taken away the people we once were. It’s changed us into something else. Something that doesn’t care about any of the things that make us human.”

               Plushie jumped down as Audrey’s rant got more heated. We sipped more wine and gathered our thoughts. I had no idea what to make of Audrey’s claims. In my head I thought it would be prudent to recommend psychological help, but deep down in my bones, I suppose I already knew this change was beyond human science and medicine.

               “So, you didn’t steal money from the Bilby Trust?” I asked.

               “I did. But I returned it last night.”

               “So, you can resist Allure?”

               “A bit. We were ready to launch our ad campaign, and I was starting to wonder what lengths humanity would go to, and if I was willing to steal so much money from the Bilby Trust to fund us spreading the word. So, I called them up and begged to return the money. They let me do it and dropped the charges.”

               “That’s great!”

               “Aisha was so mad when she found out we didn’t have the money to reveal Allure to the whole world. She hasn’t been acting like Aisha since then.”

               Audrey didn’t want to talk about Aisha beyond that, so we talked about Allure. About how she had been able to sabotage this apparently irresistible mission. About how Mandeep was almost back to normal after her brush with the data. We concluded that resistance was possible, and the longer one went without exposure to Allure, the less its grip on the mind. I convinced Audrey that if she went back home and talked to Aisha, she could make her see reason and together they could cold turkey their way out of Allure’s grip.

               God forgive me, I convinced Audrey to go back home.

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My phone rang at 3am the morning after I talked to Audrey. I was in bed with my girlfriend and Plushie, but I sprang up to answer it. Even before I saw the call was from Aisha, I knew no-one would be calling me at that time unless something bad had happened.

               “Aisha? What’s happened? Is Audrey alright?” I asked.

               “Uh?” grunted my girlfriend as she sat up.

               “Meow?” said Plushie as he moved from his nest at my feet towards the head of the bed.

               Aisha said my name, said Audrey’s name, and then started babbling incoherently. She might have been crying too, I thought I heard sniffling in between the random words she was gasping out.

               “Aisha, you need to take a deep breath and calm down. What’s happened?”

               My girlfriend shot up. I’d been keeping her somewhat updated on my friend’s dual breakdown, and she’d been surprisingly fascinated by the idea of an exo-planet that could call out.

               “Audrey” Aisha said, then if she wasn’t crying before, she certainly started now. I heard her struggle to breath, and occasionally whine like a kicked dog. My girlfriend turned on her lamp, and from her worried face I figured she could hear Aisha too. Even Plushie, who’d resettled between us, stopped making biscuits and was staring at me.

               “Do you want me to come over?” I asked.

               “No!” Aisha shouted. Then, she stuttered a bit and finally choked out a quiet “yes.”

               A chill ran down my spine as I remembered how Audrey had struggled to physically say she no longer wanted to spread the knowledge of Allure.

               “I can come over, if you have no objection” I said.

               “Umph!” Aisha made a strange grunt, as if she had silenced her initial response at the last second.  I heard a long, high-pitched whine before she finally let out another small “yes please”.

               “Could you put Audrey on?” I asked. “Are you both okay?”

               A gasp, and then I was treated to Aisha’s heavy breathing for so long that my girlfriend got up to make tea, with Plushie close behind.

               “Aisha?” I asked.

               “Audrey’s dead” she said, before wailing and hanging up the phone.

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I drove to Aisha and Audrey’s house alone. My girlfriend wanted to come, but I begged her to stay. I was staring to believe in Allure’s power now, so involving her any more seemed dangerous.

 Aisha opened the door, her eyes rimmed red and her face struck forlorn under the flickering front light. I said hi and asked what happened to Audrey. I didn’t really think she could be dead. Aisha didn’t say a word. She walked back into the house. I followed her to the game room.

The first thing I saw when Aisha opened the door was Audrey slumped face-down over Aisha’s keyboard. The second thing I noticed was the streak of blood smeared across the wall above the monitor. Further examination revealed globs of human gore all over the desk and walls, as well as dents in the wall, desk, and a massive, bloody crack on one of Aisha’s monitors.

“My god Audrey” I said as I rushed into the room. I had a vague notion of checking for a pulse, but as I reached out my hand, I saw her skull was shattered and froze. My outstretched hand began to shake as I struggled to breath.

“She was going to delete all my Allure data” Aisha said. Her voice was flat and emotionless. I turned around and saw her looking at Audrey’s body as if she were looking at a dead cockroach “She’d already deleted all the work we’d done on our ad for it. She deleted it!”

“My god Aisha, what have you done?”

“You encouraged this, didn’t you?” Aisha continued, stepping into the room. At some point, she’d managed to grab one of Audrey’s hiking poles and was gripping it tightly in her hand.

“Audrey came to me with her doubts” I said, backing away and raising my still-shaking hands. “She told me she’d already began sabotaging the release. Aisha this has nothing to do with me!”

I will be honest, I don’t remember exactly what I said as I backed away begging for my life. My back pressed up against the cold wall, and I cried as Aisha slowly walked towards me, hiking pole now held firmly in front of her. She paused as she bumped the back of the chair Audrey was sitting in, but she didn’t take her eyes off me.

“Aisha, you killed Audrey” I said. “You killed your wife! Surely you can’t be alright with that! Is Allure worth it?”

“Allure is humanity’s salvation” Aisha said. “Neither you nor Audrey know what it’s like. That it is offering us something so much greater than we could ever have on Earth.”

I can remember the horrific monologue Aisha gave me word for word, but I dare not repeat it. Not only did she name the star, which I am obviously not going to share, but she told me technical details about Allure. Its size and chemical composition, the way it orbited its star, information about the other bodies in its system.

She gave me more knowledge about Allure.

Knowledge that I knew had to be true, because as she spoke, I could feel Allure latching onto me. Tendrils creeping through the creases of my brain, a tight grip on my heart. I begged her to stop, but she just kept talking as my legs grew weak and I slid down the wall. She described seeing something monstrous in an increasingly cheery voice, and even though I could tell how horrible it was, it seemed awesome.

“Audrey told me she was worried about what humanity would do if we really set out to reach Allure at any cost” Aisha said. “I get her concern, but it’s fine. For most of human history, most people have suffered horribly, but they still persevered. They didn’t have a goal in mind, or any hope their descendants would be rewarded, but they still chose to toil and reproduce. Humans will always choose to live for Allure rather than die in a nuclear war.”

“Audrey wouldn’t have” I said, my voice a tiny squeak.

“Audrey” Aisha said, reaching out to stroke her wife’s blood-mattered hair. “My Audrey. I do love her. But I’ve already started thinking about how her life insurance money will fund the Allure ads I need to put out. As long as it doesn’t look like I killed her.”

“My God Aisha, she was your wife” I said.

“And I love her” Aisha said. “But by tomorrow morning, any remorse I have about killing her will be gone. Tomorrow I won’t give a shit that she’s gone. Which is why I needed you here tonight.”

“Aisha no please, I am begging you.”

“You’re here, because I need you to help me end this now, before I lose all my feelings for Audrey.”

I begged for my life as I envisioned Aisha mutilating both me and Audrey’s body to try and stage a fight. I looked into her eyes as she lifted the hiking pole and saw she’d started crying again. Then she slammed the hiking pole down. I raised my hands to cover my face, but she didn’t strike me.

With a plastic crash, she skewered her own computer tower, then pulled the pole out and smashed the computer again, and again, as tears ran down her face.

“Allure stole the love I have for Audrey!” Aisha said. “It stole my love!”

Those tendrils in my mind flared, and I snapped out of my paralysis. I lunged towards Aisha, and with a scream, I put my hands around her throat squeezed the life out of her.

   ________________________________

I let go before any permanent damage was done. I swear I did. But I have typed and deleted my retelling of the rest of that night dozens of times and it has never come across as believable. Not with what came before, and not with how things ended that night.

I have no reason to lie about it here. Not after changing everyone’s name, doing everything to anonymize this account, and using a proxy to approach a proxy to get the story edited and sold as fiction. It must be labelled as fiction, because you must have room to doubt Allure’s existence. I think that is why I was able to release Aisha before she went limp. I had not seen the Allure data, so there was still room in my mind for Aisha and Audrey to be crazy and the presence in my mind to be some sort of hallucination.

Aisha’s death was self-sacrifice. Suicide I suppose, except Aisha wasn’t suicidal. She told me so before she drank the poisoned wine she’d set up before I arrived. Even with the love of her life dead and her life in ruins, it was still in Aisha’s nature to persevere. We even managed to talk about Plushie, and she said she wanted to finish leash training him.

But she was now the only person left who knew how to find Allure, and therefore her death was the most devastating blow she could make on this cosmic fiend.

I watched her struggle to bring the glass to her lips. I wanted to stop her, but I couldn’t tell if that was my own human decency, or Allure trying to save its last major piece. Aisha tasked me with destroying all remaining traces of Allure, a task that kept me busy all that night, and awake for countless nights after.

I made sure Aisha and Audrey’s bodies were together, then I drove to a servo, brought a lighter, filled my jerrycan, parked my car two blocks away, and walked back into that ruined home. I doused the computers, doused the work desks, doused every scrap of paper I could find. Then I doused my friends, and the home they had built together. I set it all on fire and ran.

Well, I used some paint I’d found in the house to write a homophobic message in the driveway first, in the hopes of confusing an investigation. Not that it mattered. Two days later fuel rationing kicked in, and the resulting riots seem to have distracted both the cops and the media.

You must be wondering why I have written and distributed this account after going to such efforts to finish the destruction Aisha started. I assure you, it is not because I now want Allure’s salvation. I do not have much faith in humanity’s ability to reason our way out of our current problems, but I must place my faith in human hands and urge you all to do the same.

I say this because I have experienced my parents and community shelve their love for me and make me suffer in the name of a greater good, at the alleged insistence of a being beyond our understanding. I know that Audrey was right about the nightmare this planet would become for most people if humanity committed to reaching Allure at any cost, and I do not wish it on the entire world.

Audrey and Aisha also knew that pain. I’m sure plenty of queer people do. I must wonder if our experiences with attempted religious conversion made us more attune to the dangers of Allure. Or if it gave us more practise resisting brainwashing.

Whatever the reason we were able to shake off Allure, I must assume that the next person to discover it might not be able to do it alone.

And yes, if our civilisation endures, there will be another Allure discovery. I destroyed all Aisha’s information on Allure, but that was just her analysis of data that NASA is already sharing with the public. The light from Allure’s sun has already been seen by the James Webb Telescope and recorded for prosperity. I’d have to ask someone from NASA to remove that bit of the raw data. Even if I wanted to tell NASA about Allure, and even if they believed me and were willing to do so, I have no idea where it is.

Allure is in our data. It is a part of humanity’s collective knowledge, and we can no more banish it from our lives than we can the process for making a nuclear bomb.

Allure will be found again, so I have written this account with the hope that I can provide guidance to the next person to exhume this curse.

I will now try to live my life with my girlfriend and Plushie, with as much happiness as my conscience will allow. But I will forever be expecting to see that terrible data find its way before me. Every pop-up ad, every piece of junk mail, every algorithmically selected post or video that comes before me could be the end of my humanity. But hopefully, by sharing this story, enough of you will know to stop the spread of such information before it is too late.

The only concern I have, is that I cannot tell if I have come to these conclusions with my own reasoning, or if my sudden desire to write this account is Allure’s final gambit.

THE END

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