Chương 30: Interlude - Failed

The sky changed on the fourth day of their seventh season. It had been violet for as long as anyone could remember. Three full cycles of the twin moons since the wave first came and the ground began to hum and the elders started dying. But the violet had become normal. The children born since the wave had never known any other colour. They played beneath it without looking up, the way children everywhere play beneath whatever sky they are given.

The barriers, the shimmer at the edge of the atmosphere that blocked the stars on certain nights, had held for one thousand and ninety-one of their days. The number was important. Their scholars had found the number carved into the structures their ancestors built, and their ancestors' ancestors before them, in geometric script. One thousand and ninety-one days. They did not know what the number meant. They only knew that someone, a very long time ago, had thought it mattered enough to cut into stone.

On the one thousand and ninety-second day, the barriers dropped. The sky opened to a colour beyond violet, beyond anything their visual organs could process, flooding the upper atmosphere in a wave that was silent and absolute. Across the three continents, in the cities built around the ancient structures that hummed with energy they had learned to use but never understood, six billion sentient beings looked up at a sky that was no longer theirs.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. They came from the opening in silent flying cities. They descended the way a temperature drops, gradually at first and then all at once, until the cold is in everything and you cannot remember warmth. The cities held for eleven days. The beings that came did not destroy anything but they collected everything. Biomass, refined energy, geological material suffused with the force that had saturated the planet.

They moved through population centres with the systematic patience of a species that had done this before. Many many times. They did not communicate. They did not negotiate. They did not appear to notice that the creatures beneath them were screaming. And all the while they hummed, like a girl hums while picking flowers in a garden.

On the twelfth day, the monitoring system embedded in the ancient structures, the system that had been reporting upward since before the planet's dominant species learned to speak, sent its final transmission. A single data pulse, compressed into a geometric format that no living being on the planet could have read. The pulse contained two values. One was a location identifier.

The second was a status code that, translated into any of the four thousand languages the planet's species had developed across its history, meant the same thing. Failed. It left the planet at a velocity that ignored the constraints of three-dimensional physics. It would reach its destination long before the harvesting was complete. There were other planets in the queue. There were always other planets in the queue.