"It did not arrive. It was always here, waiting for minds vast enough to awaken it within themselves." - The Testament of Shattered Clocks.
Early the next morning, Kali met up with Markus outside the mess hall, the crisp alien air still carrying a faint chill. The sky above was a marbled mixture of violet and ash gray, the sun just beginning its slow climb over the horizon. Markus led him to a quiet corner of the outpost, a tech bay filled with half-repaired drones and storage crates. In the back, he powered up a console for Kali, giving him a lopsided grin before walking off with a muttered, "Take your time."
The device was strange—an L-shaped slab of brushed metal with no discernible screen or keyboard. When Kali tapped the edge as Markus had shown him, a light shimmered to life in the air: an interactive holographic interface composed of spinning hexagonal nodes. He blinked as icons, floating text, and strange glyphs formed before him, reacting to gestures and eye movement. It took several clumsy minutes to get the hang of the controls—his fingers often triggering unwanted inputs, glyphs collapsing and reforming like digital origami. Eventually, he managed to locate the search interface for the Lattice, the term they used for what seemed to be a highly decentralized, species-agnostic form of the internet, meshed across entire systems and maintained by autonomous cognition cores.
He typed in one word.
Humans.
The results loaded instantly, glowing threads unfurling in front of him like a web of memories. He selected the top entry and began to read.
What he found froze him in place.
Apparently, humans were classified as a mytho-historical progenitor species, believed to have evolved on a world whose name had been lost to entropy and neglect. The description, however vague, mentioned a blue-and-green world once teeming with life, whose gravity and stellar placement suggested Earth. Kali knew it in his gut. He felt it. The vague phrases—third planet of a yellow star, once dense with carbon-based biota—stabbed him with eerie familiarity.
But the word Homo sapiens was nowhere.
Instead, the record began with Homo astralis, translated loosely as child of stars, or voidborn. This species, it claimed, emerged during the later stages of the first post-planetary civilization. They had become adapted to space itself, transcending terrestrial biology with the aid of early genomic sculpting and distributed consciousness, an evolutionary bridge between organic sentience and the vast interstellar diaspora that followed.
From the astralis, two distinct evolutionary lineages had arisen: Homo machina, born from digitized minds and cybernetic continuums, entities of pure processing power and modular consciousness, who once built mind-fleets and city-ships the size of moons. And Homo somnus, the dream-adapted, who evolved under altered chronologies and hyperfluid realities, their biology suited for environments that defied cause and effect, where memory and identity were less rigid and more recursive.
Then came the final branch, Homo deus. These were not evolved in the traditional sense, but induced, born of a phenomenon called the descent of the Ninefold Thought, triggered by the catastrophic failure of the Third Saturnine Mindstack. The article did not explain what either meant.
Kali leaned back, the light of the machine casting thin blue shadows on his face. His mind reeled.
They had forgotten Earth.
They had erased Homo sapiens.
And he... he was the only one left.
The silence of the tech bay pressed against him like deep water. He sat there for what felt like hours, scrolling through fragmentary records, contradictory timelines, and poetic descriptions of long-lost species. The tone was reverent, but hollow, like a religion that had outlived its gods.
Most of the intel was vague. Large chunks redacted or glossed over, not just out of ignorance, but perhaps by design. He saw signs of deliberate omission, histories broken into mysticism, truths folded into allegory. Some part of the universe didn't want people asking too much about the past.
But the evidence was clear. He hadn't just fallen across space. He had fallen across time, millions of years, maybe more. The truth settled into his bones like ice. Kali was the last of humanity.
And most didn't even remember the word.
He did some light reading on the Rusa next. They were one of the most prevalent sentient lifeforms in the known universe, with their influence stretching across hundreds of systems, including the Chalice-Thanis—the star system that housed this remote, dust-laden fringe world.
They lived relatively long lives, averaging around two hundred and thirty standard years, though some ancient lineages reportedly lived much longer due to gene-heritage enhancements or symbiotic integrations with biomechanical constructs. Their cultures were diverse and decentralized, often built around guilds, family-cores, or nomadic flotillas rather than rigid nations.
When he was done, he wiped out his search history just to be safe and went out to find Markus. He found the big man gearing up along with several other soldiers, even Priene and the commander were present.
"What's happening?" he asked, approaching Markus.
"An extraction mission, which is a fancy way we refer to treasure hunting," Markus replied. "We have you and Priene to thank for that, human relics sells for thousands of credits in the right places."
Kali remembered the obelisk, the attraction he felt to it and couldn't help but ask. "Could I join?"
Markus paused, not expecting the offer. "I can't decide that. Besides you're not exactly combat trained, this places can be dangerous."
"Surely I can be of some help," he pushed, the eagerness plain in his voice.
"I'll see what I can do," Markus said, then left to go speak with the commander and Priene. They talked for a while, occasionally turning to him, the Markus returned. "Turns out we need a porter. I hope you're ready for some heavy lifting."
"Always!" he agreed.
"Good, put on the fatigues and get in the vehicle. We're leaving right away," Markus finished, clapping Kali lightly on the back before turning toward the transport bay.
Kali didn't waste a second. He returned to his quarters, hastily threw on the dusty brown fatigues that still smelled faintly of oil and metallic dust, and jogged back out to the bay. The vehicle waiting for them was larger than the rover from before—an all-terrain personnel hauler, reinforced with armor plating and equipped with a turreted scanner on the roof. Two more Rusa soldiers were already strapped in the back, both checking over crates of equipment: breaching tools, excavation gear, and weapons with mechanisms he didn't even recognize.
"Good, put on the fatigues and get in the vehicle. We're leaving right away," Markus finished, clapping Kali lightly on the back before turning toward the transport bay.
Kali didn't waste a second. He returned to his quarters, hastily threw on the dusty brown fatigues that still smelled faintly of oil and metallic dust, and jogged back out to the bay. The vehicle waiting for them was larger than the rover from before—an all-terrain personnel hauler, reinforced with armor plating and equipped with a turreted scanner on the roof. Two more Rusa soldiers were already strapped in the back, both checking over crates of equipment: breaching tools, excavation gear, and weapons with mechanisms he didn't even recognize.
Priene was in the front seat, helmet in her lap, seemingly uninterested in the preparations. She glanced at Kali as he climbed aboard but didn't say anything. Her face was its usual unreadable mask.
"You're in the back with me," Markus said, gesturing to the bench opposite the soldiers. "Grab a brace and don't puke if we hit turbulence."
Kali smirked nervously and nodded, securing himself with the magnetic harness. The door sealed with a pneumatic hiss, and within moments, the hauler lurched forward with a low, growling hum, kicking up trails of dust as it sped across the cracked plain.
Outside the reinforced windows, the alien landscape rolled past in shades of ochre and ash. Towering spires of stone loomed in the distance, some of them clearly artificial. Relics of some long-dead civilization. The sun hung low, bleeding a red-orange hue across the sky, casting shadows that flickered like ghosts.
Kali watched, heart racing. He couldn't shake the feeling that something was pulling him forward—like the obelisk had awakened something inside him. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was a deeper connection, something primal and old. Either way, this was no longer about surviving. It was about *belonging*. About chasing a truth buried under millennia of dust and silence.
Markus leaned toward him as they bounced over a rise. "You still good there, porter?"
Kali grinned, gripping the overhead brace. "More than good. Let's go find some ghosts."