thethemeis: The Unexpected
theauthoris: Ben Hayes
We never imagined what we would find there.
In 2203, humanity finally cracked the interstellar travel problem. The discovery of sixthspace, and the Cao-Mulciber drive allowed us to make trips of hundreds of lightyears in just a few days.
With space suddenly so much smaller, we found human-habitable planets. Not many, but enough. Within decades, our species was at last proof against sudden extinction, no longer at the mercy of Earth's fate.
What we did not find, was life.
There were no intelligent aliens - no interstellar federation waiting to welcome us, no rogue AIs lying in wait to subjugate us, nothing but the occasional bit of native fauna.
And we wondered why.
Why, on all these worlds, worlds we knew could sustain life, we found none other.
And then the first ship vanished.
The Sanssouci, a bulk transport ship carrying food, medicine, and three-and-a-half thousand souls. It left Earth bound for Guangzhe colony, dropped into sixthspace eight days out, and was never seen again.
We didn't realise. Didn't guess what had begun.
Three more ships vanished, before we finally understood.
The recording is historical, and not one person has forgotten the moment they heard it.
"This is the Los Rheas. We jumped from Nuevos Angeles, en route to Grace's Shore. There is... we were attacked. There is something in sixthspace. Do you understand? Sixthspace is not empty."
Two days later, the colony on Grace's Shore was gone.
All trace of it, every person, every building, every dropped crisp-packet. They made no transmissions, and there was no warning. They simply vanished.
It didn't take long for us to guess what had happened.
Something had followed the Los Rheas, divined its destination. Something terrible.
The government ordered an immediate moratorium on sixthspace travel.
People panicked. Trying desperately to get home to their families, they hijacked ships, bought passage with smugglers and black-marketeers. And in doing so, they made a trail.
Earth was lost almost instantly. It was too large, too well known. People flocked there in droves, and it must have burned like a beacon in the vast, grey expanse of sixthspace. Billions upon billions of people, gone. The great colonies, too. Lincolnsheim. Albion. Tien-sha. All wiped clean, as people led fate to them.
And so we are come to this, a last few scant handfuls of humanity, clinging precariously to our most distant and most desolate worlds, the places to which no-one wished to flee.
We left no traces, no Ozymandias amidst the shifting sands. In eons to come, if explorers of another race should ever land upon our birthworld, will they too wonder at its emptiness, and think themselves alone among the stars?
We know now why we found no other life.
And every day, we watch the skies and pray that no-one comes.
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