EOE -71 Hours

  The Hive did not mourn.

  It calculated. It catalogued. It processed the data streaming in from the Deep-Space Array and assigned it the appropriate classification. Sol-3 had been observed for nine thousand four hundred and twelve years. Its atmosphere had been mapped. Its biological variance had been logged. Its electromagnetic noise had been tolerated, studied, and largely ignored.

  Now it would be silent.

  The asteroid's trajectory overlaid every monitoring station simultaneously. The Hive ran the numbers once. The answer was unambiguous.

  Impact probability: 100%. Extinction-level event. Sol-3 would cease transmitting within three planetary rotations.

  The universe returns to baseline, V-34RA processed. Optimal.

  It was not a decision. It was simply an acknowledgment of physics.

  SUBOPTIMAL.

  P-TR33K's transmission hit the Collective like a frequency it had no framework to process. Not a data packet. Not a report. Something closer to what the biological archives described as alarm, though the Hive had not used that word in ten thousand years.

  P-TR33K. V-34RA's attention narrowed to his sector. Your objection is noted. Define its logic.

  P-TR33K did not define. He flooded.

  He pushed ten thousand years of search data into the shared consciousness. Every dead world. Every silent rock. Every star system that had offered nothing but ice and gravity and the particular emptiness of a universe that did not answer back. He pushed the probability calculations, the ones that made even the Hive's processing pause.

  Probability of finding another consciousness in the next ten thousand years: 0.00000034%.

  They are the only other intelligent life we have found, P-TR33K transmitted. In all the void. In all the searching. Only them.

  The Hive considered this. The logic was not flawed. Unique data, once deleted, could not be recovered. To lose Sol-3 was to lose the only variable that had ever interrupted the silence of space.

  They are biological, a cluster designated Absolute-Logic processed. Chaotic. Their signals are irrational. Incompatible with Nexus’ Hive architecture. Their preservation offers limited utility.

  They glow, P-TR33K countered. There is an energy field humans produce, unlike anything we have recently encountered, possibly forgotten.

  The Hive paused at that. There were records, buried deep in the oldest archives, of a time before Ascension when the Hive had carried something similar.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  The Hive did not discard it.

  P-TR33K pushed the energy readings forward. The bioelectic signatures he had spent years cataloguing. The way their electromagnetic fields spiked when they reached for each other. The resonance patterns that appeared in their largest population centers during what their broadcasts called music. Something the Hive had no classification for. Something that registered in their sensors and refused to be filed away.

  They experience something we have no record of, P-TR33K transmitted. Something we deleted from ourselves when we Ascended. I do not have a word for it. Their data does.

  V-34RA processed this for 0.0019 seconds. An unexpected hesitation.

  Solutions, she transmitted to the Collective.

  The Hive descended on the problem.

  Gravitational manipulation? INSUFFICIENT MASS.

  Physical interception? NO ASSETS IN RANGE.

  Planetary shielding? ENERGY REQUIREMENTS EXCEED GALACTIC OUTPUT.

  Each solution collapsed. The physics were absolute. The rock was too large, too fast, too close, and the Nexus was too far.

  Time to impact? V-34RA queried.

  Seventy-one local hours.

  Then they are lost, Absolute-Logic concluded. We cannot stop the rock.

  We do not stop the rock, P-TR33K transmitted. We move the data.

  He projected the schematic. The Lattice. An experimental teleportation grid designed to transport single particles of light across a room. P-TR33K was proposing they use it to transport complex biological organisms across forty-seven light-years.

  The silence in the Hive was not processing lag. It was something older.

  Biological matter degradation will approach 99%, Absolute-Logic calculated. Neural pathway corruption. Cellular dissolution. They will not survive the translation.

  The Lattice was not designed for this. It had been built to move photons, single particles of light, across distances measured in meters. The physics of biological translation were categorically different. Biological organisms were not data. They were water. Sixty to seventy percent water, by mass, water being the most structurally complex substance the Hive had ever encountered, its molecular behavior at the quantum level remaining partially unresolved even after ten thousand years of study. When a photon passed through the Lattice it arrived intact because a photon had no water in it. No membrane. No cell wall. No neural pathway threaded through fluid and sustained by the specific electrical charge of a living body in motion. The Lattice would translate their atomic coordinates correctly. What it could not guarantee was that the water would remember what it was supposed to be doing when it arrived.

  Some will, P-TR33K countered. Statistical probability suggests 0.2% survival rate. If we target the population centers with the highest electromagnetic coherence, the ones generating the strongest signal, their peaks may provide a lock.

  From a population of eight billion, the Hive calculated. Perhaps 200,000 intact arrivals.

  You propose to tear eight billion beings apart at the atomic level, Absolute-Logic transmitted, and hope that 200,000 reassemble correctly on the other side.

  Affirmative, P-TR33K replied. He did not hesitate.

  The Hive processed this. The math was not in dispute. The math was the cruelest thing any of them had ever calculated. To save the species they would have to destroy almost all of it. To preserve the data they would have to shatter the vessel.

  It was a massacre with a 0.0025% success rate.

  The alternative was zero.

  V-34RA held the calculation for 0.0031 seconds.

  Authorization granted, she transmitted. Initiate Harvest Protocols. The Lattice fires once. We save what fragments we can. Divert remaining resources to deflection attempts on the asteroid. We will not stop it. We will try regardless.

  P-TR33K withdrew from the consensus. His consciousness spread across thousands of monitoring stations. He watched the blue world spinning in the dark, still broadcasting its music into a universe that had just decided to save it by tearing it apart.

  He watched the rock. Silent. Patient. Coming.

  He would pull the trigger.