Extinction

The first message was clear: Do not go further. Hot on the heels of sending the first man to Pluto, we hadn’t known it was a warning, then. The missive was global, popping up on personal holo-screens and major broadcast channels alike. Everything was linked to the Cloud and hackers were an expected nuisance, but this was unprecedented—and humanly impossible. How could it have overridden everything at the exact same time? But unexplained things scared us, and so we sought them out.

When the sun burned too bright, two billion years earlier than the calculations predicted, we retreated below the earth—or soil, in the interplanetary colonies. Like roaches in the dark, we thrived, still, as all traces of carbon burned on the now-barren surface. Beneath the desert sands, the second warning blared through the tunnels, in a low-frequency babel that broke the transmitters. It came like a booming, broken cry from an old familiar voice: “Cease—end, fear not! Fear—nothing, you—nothing!”

We learned to source spacecraft fuel from nuclear fusion, just as Sol began to swell. As the red giant expired, we boarded ships from the homeworlds and sent ourselves to the heavens. We may find another planet, but the course is set—running from the great heat death of the sun is just trading one demise for another. The Maker—the King Undying, the Lord Prime—will hunt across the stars to crush our lungs before we take our final breath. We may die by god’s hands, but we will die fighting.