I Was Supposed to Be His Fated Soulmate, But He Treated Me Like a Science Experiment

The only light in the observatory came from the glow of three monitors, their cold, blue-white glare illuminating the focused lines of Leo’s face. Outside the dome’s sealed slit, the city was a distant, muted hum, but in here, the only sounds were the quiet whir of a server fan and the soft clicks of his keyboard. The great telescope beside him stood like a silent sentinel, its lens capped. He wasn't looking at the stars tonight; he was looking for one person among billions, and the sky was too vast, too imprecise. The real map, the one that mattered, was encoded in data streams and predictive algorithms.

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, his eyes burning from hours of staring at scrolling lines of code. It was a problem of celestial mechanics, but on a micro-scale. If the universe had gone to the trouble of printing a guide onto his very skin, it stood to reason that the guide would follow a set of predictable, physical laws. Fate wasn't magic; it was simply a complex set of variables he hadn't yet solved for.

On the pale skin of his left forearm, the constellation of Orion was a series of faint, silver marks, almost like powdered starlight pressed into his flesh. It was dormant now, but he knew its patterns. He had mapped every freckle, every tiny star in the belt and the nebula, treating his own body as the first data set. Sometimes, when a new variable was entered into his software—a change in atmospheric pressure, a subtle gravitational wave from a distant cosmic event—the marks would warm almost imperceptibly. He would log the sensation, timestamp it, and feed it back into the system.

This was his life’s work, more consuming than his actual astrophysics research. The loneliness was a physical presence in the sterile quiet of the dome. It was a cold spot in the center of his chest, a hollow ache that his logical mind could not explain away or ignore. He saw couples walking hand-in-hand, their own constellations sometimes glowing with a soft, private light that signaled they had found their match. For them, it was a fairy tale. For Leo, it was a race against the crushing, silent expanse of time. He refused to simply wait. He would force the universe’s hand. He would pinpoint the exact time and location of his fated meeting, down to the square meter.

He ran the primary simulation again, his jaw tight with anticipation. The program he’d designed over the last seven years churned through terabytes of data: census records, social media activity, transit schedules, even planetary alignments. All of it was designed to narrow the probability field, to find the single point in space-time where his Orion would finally align with its counterpart. The progress bar crept across the screen with agonizing slowness, each percentage point a small victory against the vast, indifferent cosmos. He was close. The ache in his chest sharpened. He was so close.

Across town, the air in Cassia’s studio was thick with the scent of wet clay, turpentine, and dust motes dancing in the warm yellow light of a single bare bulb. Music, a raw and soulful blues track, spilled from a small speaker, weaving through the chaotic landscape of half-finished projects, discarded sketches, and splatters of dried plaster. In the center of it all, Cassia worked, her entire focus narrowed to the towering column of clay in front of her.

Her hands, caked to the wrists in gray slip, moved with a practiced, intuitive grace. She wasn't just shaping the material; she was arguing with it, coaxing it, her fingers pressing and smoothing, her palms defining a curve that was just beginning to resemble a human spine. This was real. The cool, yielding weight of the clay, the pull in her shoulders, the satisfying grit under her fingernails. This was a universe of her own making, born from effort and intention.

A soft, silvery light pulsed against the sleeve of her rolled-up flannel. She felt a familiar, prickling warmth spread across the skin of her forearm. Without looking down, she knew her Lyra constellation was shimmering. It did this sometimes, a faint and hopeful glimmer, as if trying to get her attention. She resolutely ignored it, her jaw tightening as she scraped away a sliver of clay with a wire tool.

To Cassia, the constellations were a beautiful lie. A romantic, comforting myth that robbed people of their most fundamental choice. The idea that some cosmic force had already picked out her partner, that her life’s greatest connection was pre-written in a star map on her body, felt like a cage. It was a gilded, pretty cage, but a cage nonetheless. She didn’t want a soulmate who was simply an answered question, a destination plotted on a celestial GPS.

She wanted the mess. She wanted the uncertainty, the wrong turns, the terrifying and exhilarating freedom of meeting someone and building a connection from nothing but shared laughter and late-night conversations. Love, to her, should be a choice made every single day, not a destiny you stumbled into because your skin told you to. It should be forged in the fire of shared experience, not handed down from the cold, distant stars.

The light on her arm faded, and she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Good. She pressed her thumb firmly into the clay, creating a deep indentation at the base of the sculpture’s neck. Her art was her truth. It was messy, difficult, and entirely her own. She would not let a shimmer of light dictate the path of her heart. She would create her own connections, just as she created the forms that rose from the earth beneath her hands.

The progress bar hit ninety-nine percent and stalled. Leo held his breath, his fingers frozen over the keyboard. The server fan seemed to grow louder, the only sound in the universe. He could feel his own pulse, a frantic, unsteady rhythm in his throat. Seven years of his life, of his focus, of his gnawing solitude, were compressed into this single, agonizing moment of digital processing. He leaned forward, his nose inches from the monitor, as if his proximity could somehow will the final calculation into existence.

Then, with a soft, anticlimactic chime, it was done.

One hundred percent.

A new window bloomed on the central screen, stark white against the dark interface. It contained no fanfare, just lines of text and a small, embedded map.

PROBABILITY CONVERGENCE: 98.4%
EVENT: Opening Night Art Exhibition, ‘Forged Universes’
VENUE: Chroma Gallery, 14th Street Arts District
DATE: October 12
TIME WINDOW: 19:30 - 21:00 GMT-5

He read the words three times, his mind struggling to accept the simplicity of the answer. An art gallery. It was so… mundane. So terrestrial. He had been charting cosmic waves and planetary transits, and the answer was a small brick building three miles away.

As the reality of it settled in, a sharp, electric warmth spread through his left forearm. It was different from the faint, questioning pulses he was used to. This was a definitive, insistent heat, a feeling of activation. He pulled back the sleeve of his shirt. Against his pale skin, the silver marks of Orion were glowing, each star point a tiny, brilliant pinprick of light. The glow was steady, unwavering, a confirmation so powerful it made his breath catch. His data was correct. His theory was proven.

A tremor went through his hands. This was it. The end of the experiment. The solution to the equation that was his loneliness. He stood up, his legs unsteady, and began pacing the small circumference of the observatory floor. His mind, now released from the strain of calculation, shifted immediately to logistics.

He would not go for the art. Art was subjective, chaotic—the antithesis of his entire approach. He would treat the gallery as a controlled environment, the attendees as data points. He would need a systematic method for observing each person, a way to scan for a reciprocal glow without being obvious. He would start at one end of the room and move methodically to the other. He would be discreet, detached, and efficient. He would find her. The thought sent another jolt through him, this one less analytical and more terrifyingly human. Within forty-eight hours, he would be standing in the same room as the person the universe had built for him. He just had to find her in the crowd.