The Last Echo of Sector 7

The Last Echo of Sector 7

The distress beacon had been repeating for three hundred years.

In the lawless fringe of Sector 7, three-hundred-year-old signals usually meant one of two things: a hull full of degraded, useless scrap, or a lethal trap left behind by long-dead raiders. But Jax was down to his last half-liter of oxygen-scrubber fluid, and his ship, The Rustbucket, was practically running on hope and duct tape. He changed course.

He found the source buried in the rusted ribcage of a massive dreadnought, half-sunken into the grey sands of an airless moon.

The Terminal

Jax squeezed through a tear in the dreadnought’s titanium hull, his suit lights cutting through a fog of frozen atmosphere. In the center of the ruined bridge sat an ancient console, its green phosphor screen miraculously glowing.

[INCOMING DATA STREAM]
[DECRYPTION COMPLETE]

He brushed a thick layer of lunar dust off the keys. The beacon wasn’t a distress call. It was a data loop, transmitting a single, localized database. Jax plugged his datapad into the console’s auxiliary port.

“Come on,” Jax muttered, his breath fogging his visor. “Give me coordinates to an old fuel depot. A colony. Anything.”

The screen flickered. A line of text slowly rendered:

PROJECT GENESIS: STATUS UPDATE Earth evacuation successful. Seed Ship ‘Argo’ departed 2154. Destination: Sector 7, Planet 3 (Habitable).

Jax stared at the screen. He looked out the shattered viewport of the dreadnought at the dead, grey moon beneath him, and then up at the toxic, acid-choked gas giant looming in the sky above.

The Realization

There was no third planet in Sector 7. Not anymore.

He scrolled down. The log archive continued, dated three centuries ago:

• Day 40: Arrived at Sector 7, Planet 3. Atmosphere is perfect. Soil is fertile. We are building the first city.
• Day 42: We turned on the planetary core stabilizer to accelerate the terraforming grid.
• Day 43: The stabilizer went critical. The planet collapsed into a micro-singularity, leaving behind only a field of irradiated dust and this moon.

Jax leaned his helmet against the cold metal of the console. The legendary ancestors he had spent his life searching for—the pioneers of the Old World—hadn’t vanished into some glorious, distant galaxy. They had arrived at their promised land, built a machine to make it perfect, and accidentally deleted the entire planet on their second day.

On the screen, a final, automated system prompt popped up:

Would you like to rate your terraforming experience? (Y/N)

Jax let out a dry, wheezing laugh that echoed inside his suit. He hit ‘N’, unplugged his datapad, and began the long walk back to his dying ship.