Propulsion at Twelve O’Clock — The... The Amber-Eyed Bald Woman Who Knew Ashlar.

In the year 3147, the arcology spires of New London pierced the engineered twilight sky like obsidian needles. Ashlar’s private suite occupied a high tier in one of the older residential towers—a space any designer of the era would have called a masterwork of biophilic restraint.

Living walls of cascading bioluminescent ferns framed floor‑to‑ceiling smart‑glass, filtering the city’s glow into soft amber gradients. The bed hovered low above a polished basalt floor, its adaptive memory foam and responsive silk shifting subtly with each breath he took. Ambient light pulsed in slow, organic rhythms synchronized to his circadian cycle.

It was perfect. Ashlar slept.

Without transition, without the familiar lurch of waking, Ashlar found himself standing outside the tower on an elevated pedestrian terrace. His body remained asleep in the bed. His consciousness—fully lucid—was here.

The realization arrived not as panic but as crystalline certainty. This was not a dream.

To his right stood a figure nearly seven feet tall. She wore a seamless garment the color of aged cream and desert stone. Bald. Graceful. Her features resembled an East Asian human—high cheekbones, elegant bone structure—except her eyes were slightly larger, irises glowing with impossible amber depth.

She looked at Ashlar the way someone looks at a man they’ve known across lifetimes.

A thought rose unbidden: If this is contact, then you had better hope you can wake up and dont look too much or maybe the alien look is generated by eating too much Chinese food from Lee Hoo Fook [ L H F had closed ions before this case story ].

She had already heard it.

Telepathy felt natural—less like learning a new language and more like remembering how to breathe. The emotional resonance of their first true eye contact was overwhelming: pure, wordless affection.

For a heartbeat, Ashlar saw a yellow field under an alien sun, a small boy laughing, tumbling through tall grass. Recognition so sharp it hurt.

Look twelve o’clock.

Ashlar turned. A silver bicycle hovered three inches above the terrace surface, perfectly still, its frame catching the city’s light like liquid mercury. No wheels. No propulsion.

I’m not getting on that, he projected. Real bikes don’t float. I’m not riding into some dissection table.

The tall woman didn’t argue. She simply tilted her head toward the sky.

Above the arcology canopy, something vast shifted. A cloaked mothership—kilometers long—flickered into partial visibility. Structural damage spidered across one flank like a wound refusing to heal. Plates of unknown alloy hung slightly misaligned. Majestic. Wounded.

Ashlar’s next thought was automatic, defensive: Is there a problem with the propulsion?

The word was wrong. They both knew it. Gravity was the issue.

Her expression softened into amused, fond unimpressedness—the look of an older sister who had seen this exact brand of stubbornness before. A telepathic laugh bloomed between them, warm and familiar.

Still the same, she conveyed. Even after all this time. Same knuckle‑headed being I used to chase through yellow fields. Always showing off.

No judgment. Only recognition. And love older than the solar system.

Memory blurred here—soft gaps where the mind protected itself. Somehow Ashlar was on the bike. The tall woman sat behind him, or beside him; spatial relationships felt negotiable.

They glided down what had once been a high street, now a luminous ribbon of elevated pathways and vertical gardens. At the corner where a florist existed in waking life, the façade flickered between realities: flowers in one overlay, clothing in another.

She stepped inside and returned with folded garments chosen specifically for him—practical, beautiful, quietly considerate.

They rode again. Neon light from the long‑closed Barclays Bank washed over them, its holographic signage still cycling ancient corporate colors. The bike accelerated into the glow—

And the memory simply ends.

Ashlar woke in the perfect room, heart steady, the taste of telepathic laughter still vivid.

The experience had not been requested. It never was. But the fragment carried its own quiet moral:

Even across centuries, species, and dimensions, the same old arrogance traveled with the soul. And somehow, impossibly, someone who had once been a little sister, older sister, closer relative, mum energy but non terrestrial humanoid being in a yellow field still found it endearing.