Sleep had come restlessly to Julius last night. His dreams were haunted by terrible recollections of the turning point of his relatively young manhood – witnessing that horrible and permanent tragedy that he could only dub The Event. He had never managed to come up with a better term to describe the bizarre night that transpired nearly two years ago – and, as always when those eerie images intruded upon his slumber, he awoke with a throbbing head and a knotted, aching back. The pulsing hum of The Event rang in his ears, and the last image of his mother and sisters was burned so clearly into his vision that it was almost difficult to believe that it was just a memory at this point. He shook his head roughly from side to side, as if it were as easy to clear those memories from his mind as it was to eradicate the image doodled on an Etch-a-Sketch. And yet he was never able to get rid of them completely. With a pang in his belly, he sighed, admitting to himself for the umpteenth time that he would not want to get rid of the last memory of his family, despite the trauma that reared its maw every time he conjured up their terrified and screaming faces.

Julius could never properly explain The Event to anyone – not to the neighbors, not to the police, not to the curious UFOlogists trespassing on his property whenever the moon shone full in a night sky free of clouds or light pollution, and certainly not even to himself. It had been a clear black night with a clear white moon, and he had been up late tinkering with various gadgets in his room – taking them apart, putting them back together, even scrapping together brand new inventions with bits and pieces from his gizmos as he disassembled them. Julius had a knack for all things mechanical, electronic, and digital, which remained one of the only things that still sparked anything even close to passion within him. No matter how hard he might try to focus on other tasks, the thought of a new invention or the solution to the bugs in his latest programs would inevitably sneak up on him, and he left many tasks and chores unfinished because of it, instead withdrawing to his workbench and tools in the garage where he could practice his mechanical genius.

A strange blue fog not dissimilar to cotton candy had drifted by Julius’s window that night, its edges illuminated by a pulsing pink glow. Fearing some sort of disaster, he sprang to his window to catch a better view. When he saw what sat in his backyard, he dropped the half-finished invention he was clutching, causing it to explode in a shower of cogs and springs across his floor.

It was a giant blue golf ball. Or rather, it was some sort of vehicle that was approximately a sphere of about twenty feet in diameter, and covered in uniform dimples upon its surface, save for the four perfectly circular windows evenly set around its circumference, from which the pink light was emanating. The vehicle sat on three outstretched legs in a tripod formation, and both a low hiss and that eerie blue fog emanated from the hatches from which the legs had extended.

Without wasting any time, Julius grabbed a sheet of graph paper and furiously sketched out the craft that had so abruptly and mysteriously deposited itself upon the shaggy lawn outside his window, and as he did, another hatch withdrew up into the craft, revealing an interior which could only be described as “unabashedly groovy.” Julius, a fan of cheap science fiction thrills even from his earliest years, took in the lush pink carpet, the oval mirrors suspended from the roof of the craft (bouncing light almost with a disco effect), and the animal-print covers lining the furniture. It instantly brought to his mind Barbarella and her adventures of free-lovin’ across all ends of the galaxy. Pink fog rolled from the inside of the craft and soon mingled with the blue fog, pierced only by the slow descent of a segmented landing ramp, its mechanical whirring breaking the silence of the neighborhood. In his meticulous rush to capture every engineering detail of the craft onto his paper for future studies, Julius must have ignored the sounds of his mother, Brandi, and two younger sisters, Sophie the elder and Melissa the younger, running down the hall and through the kitchen door to investigate the landing pod.

Before he realized what folly they were committing, they had taken their first steps into the strange craft. Those steps would seem to be the last steps they would ever take on Earth. With girlish wonder and giggling, his sisters bounced up the ramp and settled onto the gaudy sofas and beds inside, not once suspecting that this curiosity might rip them apart from their family home and from the planet they had never once believed they would depart. Brandi took one look toward his bedroom window with a smile, and then stepped across the threshold of the craft, her yellow bathrobe billowing in the thin pink fog. When Julius saw this, he screamed at the top of his lungs, warning them to leave the strange craft alone, but it was too late. The entry hatch slammed shut behind his mother, and the ramp retracted itself rapidly into its chamber, and the humming intensified as the vehicle began to gather power. Julius held his hand to his mouth as the faces of his family appeared in the windows, their lips conveying no sound as they begged for his help. Their fists pounded feebly against the windows of the shuttle, and proved to be completely ineffective in breaking or even scratching the surface for a possible escape. The pod began to hover several feet above the ground, its landing struts folding back inside their cubby. Even through the thickening fog, Julius could make out the tears streaming down his mother’s cheeks, and her final words to him - words she had said so many times to him over the years, but ones he would never hear again: “I love you…”

With a whine, the craft shot up into the sky and through the atmosphere, returning to the icy depths of space just as strangely as it had appeared, leaving behind just a few wisps of its cotton-candy mist and the lone permanent artifact of its visit – a circular patch of grass twenty feet in diameter the same color as the blue fog. Julius sprinted out into the yard, his sleeve covering his mouth (he didn’t want to take any chances inhaling any strange space dust), and gazed up impotently into the black carpet of the galaxy looming above him as bleak and empty as his heart.

The Badges, FBI, NASA, proved to be absolutely no help in discovering the whereabouts of the only family he had – they were lost to that final frontier unconquered by humans, and he had no hopes of pursuing them. He no longer had any blood relatives breathing the same atmosphere or held to the same planet by the same gravitational anchor. After harrowing weeks of investigation both into Julius’s “involvement” in his family’s disappearance as well as the origins of the interstellar craft, everyone just gave up on the matter. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the US Constitution, whose provisions were now severely gutted compared to the robust protections of the old days, had just barely prevented Julius from himself being forever dragged away from his family’s home. The city’s power-tripping Badges had worked him over with every trick in the book – solitary confinement, beatings, and truth serums, until they were required by law to restore his freedom to him. It was a cold case with no clues to follow and no means to track down the nonexistent leads left by the spaceship, assuming this was truly an extraterrestrial matter, and there seemed to be no human suspects to pin anything on.

Julius had taken his family for granted. Without any friends (what few friends he used to have quickly abandoned him after The Event), his family had been his only real source of human companionship. And the trauma of losing them made him fearful to seek new friends in his town or even online for fear that they too would one day suddenly vanished. He was 25 years old, with a house all to himself, and he was utterly alone.

Without any human interaction, he was overwhelmed by crippling anxiety, and sought respite the one way he knew how – by releasing himself sexually. At first it had been chronic masturbation to an increasingly graphic series of pornographic videos. And when that ceased to become enough, he purchased sex toys for himself. And when those lost their appeal, he turned to cam girls. And then he turned to lifelike sex dolls. But they, too, were a cheap facsimile of real interaction with another autonomous being – they could not express love or gratitude or concern. Julius needed a person, or at least something close to a person. He realized needed a family to ease his troubled mind. But his family was long gone…