An Empty Seed Pod
Earth is gone. Nearly seventy thousand years passed for this news to spread across the
galaxy, to the energetic Milky Way. All beings could trace their ancestry to the little blue planet,
the source of all life. Life was abundant throughout the stars, but it was all artificial, created by the
beings that had left the Earth dreaming of adventure and expansion. Only the Earth had created
life with nature.
Earth is dead.
The news reached a small planet fifty-five thousand years after Earth’s destruction, a
peculiar orb with straight rivers a dozen miles wide, running both north to south and east to west,
a perfect grid. Each square contained different ecosystems, organized with no discernable pattern.
Along the equator, snowcapped mountains rose from the rivers shining bright orange in the
morning light. Atop the highest peak, a large glass structure sat, intensifying the sun’s light as if it
were the star itself. Inside paced the planet’s solitary tenant, Light Unto the Darkness Eternal.
Light chose to represent himself with a bipedal body that would be recognizable to the
ancestors that had left the Earth millions of years ago, but he would not be familiar to them. His
body was close to ten feet tall, and the skin translucent white; when light passed through him, one
could see the rods that made up his bones, the wires that served as his veins, the round chassis that
formed his torso. No hair grew from this artificial body; he was covered only by a purple toga
trimmed with gold, no visible insignia or marks upon it. Five eyes circled his orb head with two
on the crown, that he might see in all directions. The eyes sifted through different filters thousands
of times per second, allowing the light spectrum to be seen in its entirety.
Light Unto the Darkness Eternal stared at the little green dot displayed on his glass ceiling,
showing where the Earth would have been in the morning sky had it still existed. He sighed, a
genetic ritual for he had no lungs, and the green dot disappeared. Andromeda became his focus
now, a massive galaxy larger than the Milky Way. The two galaxies had once been destined to
collide, a dance of stars lasting a billion years. The collision had been stopped, however, by an
ambitious artist that aimed to combine the two galaxies into something more beautiful than the
static cloud of an elliptical galaxy. No life existed in Andromeda to object to the artist’s designs,
and the citizens of the Milky Way agreed that they did not want to lose the beauty of their spirals.
Stars were picked out of Andromeda, one by one, and placed around the Milky Way,
germinating into rivers of starlight. When the project is finished, millions of years from now,
observers will behold a spiral galaxy encased in an orb resembling a closed flower. The artist
claimed that over the course of five million years, the orb will blossom into a flower spanning
450,000 lightyears, and will remain open for five million years. The passage of another five million
years will close the flower, and it will hibernate for one million years. A sixteen-million-year
process repeating until the stars died. A beacon to the universe to show that this small galaxy, at
least, is alive.
Light stared at the massive galaxy dominating the sky, even in the daylight, and pondered
if it was alive, like the Milky Way. If there was life, it was not loud and boisterous like the Milky
Way preferred to be. Rather, these alien Andromedians were silent, stealthy, and kept their homes
in the empty expanse. The stream of stars that left the galaxy to be positioned around the Milky
Way caught his attention, a small thread connecting hurricanes, and he wondered if the Earth-killer
had slipped past the watchful artist. Or had they spent fifty thousand years traveling between
galaxies in the dark void?
A year passed – not a year on Light’s planet, but a year for Earth – and Light Unto the
Darkness Eternal readied his star ship. He selected the path to the political center of the galaxy,
Orion, a system of a hundred stars encased in massive spheres to capture their energy, to power an
artificial planet larger than a star. Orion itself was the pinnacle of technology. The gigantic planet
should have collapsed under its own weight, but the same rejection of gravity that granted the artist
her vision of Andromeda also kept Orion from destruction.
The star ship accelerated to near the speed of light. A bright point of light lay far ahead of
the ship, like the end of a tunnel that never got any closer. The ship did not rumble; Light did not
move. Instead, he poured over news captured by the ship, focusing on bits that caught his attention,
and discarded the rest. If he wanted to, he could spend the entire fifteen thousand years reading
and watching what the vibrant galaxy provided. Even with his enhanced brain, he would never
finish. When he was younger, much younger, he would accelerate his mind, perceiving journeys
to take twice as long, that he may eat up the media the galaxy generated while he traveled.
Youth had escaped him, and he had made this journey to Orion thousands of times. Interest
in the creations of others had waned within Light; if he was not directly involved or affected, there
was no reason to be distracted by it. He slowed his mind to perceive his trip as no longer than an
hour.
The point of light ahead of the star ship began to grow, eventually breaking apart into
streaks of light, each streak searching for where they belonged in the night, becoming a star.
Light stirred. The body, not having moved for fifteen thousand years, adjusted without a
sound. Before him, a massive planet his mind had trouble comprehending lay suspended on the
fabric of spacetime, connected to hundreds of nearby stars by glowing conduits of light: star power
pumped through veins to the beating heart of the galaxy.
The ship chirped, asking for permission to connect Light to a caller from the planet. He
accepted, and a full body image filled the center of the small bridge. Light knew the person before
him was much larger than the ship’s projections made them. The being communicating with him
was a planet. The person’s name was Bakkindu, a vital member of the Milky Way’s government
for well over ten million years now. Genderless, cultureless, lacking in inspiration and imagination,
Bakkindu had decided long ago to move to Orion, but could not bear to part with home. In a
compromise, Bakkindu turned their planet into a habitable body, and had moved to Orion, residing
within its depths, controlling the galaxy from their own solar system within the massive planet; to
keep the life Bakkindu had created on the planet alive, a small red dwarf star had been placed in
Orion beside them.
“Light Unto the Darkness Eternal,” Bakkindu said. The voice was hollow, lacking
character and impact. Light knew that Bakkindu’s real voice was the volcanoes erupting on their
surface, the hurricanes blowing through their atmosphere, the rumbling of earthquakes in the crust.
“Bakkindu,” Light replied, speaking for the first time in millennia. “I am sure you know
why I am here?”
“I can guess, but I do wish you’d send word before appearing out of the black, so that I
may prepare your visit with the Premiere properly.” Bakkindu said. A storm cloud lit up a corner
of the northern hemisphere facing Light.
“Who is the current Premiere?” Light asked. He had received the news on his planet of the
most recent selection, but he had discarded it, not interested.
“She was allowed to change her name when she won, you know?” Bakkindu said. “Her
name is now Valiant Into the Night. Can you guess the name you knew her as?”
“You can’t mean Mikihel?” Nervous anticipation flooded his mind.
“You know her well,” Bakkindu said.
“I had known her well,” Light responded. “I never knew she had aspirations to become
Premiere. Especially after what my time as Premiere had done to us.”
“She has let go of the past,” Bakkindu said.
“Of course,” Light said. “As have I”
“The Premiere will be available to you in a month’s time, a few days after you’ve landed.
She has said you will have her attention for a full day. She must have forgiven you if she’s willing
to give you that much time.” Bakkindu said.
“Or she’s showing off, giving me a day when I never gave her a minute.”
VALIANT Into the Night sat in the chair of the Premiere, adjusted for her size. The person
previously known as Mikihel sat on the chair, matte black and without ornament, with dignity and
honor, her former husband a mere speck beneath her. She towered nearly a thousand feet above
him, a bipedal creature much like Light, yet no attempt had been made to appear organic. The skin
of her blocky casing was glossy white, creating blinding contrast to the chair she sat in. A single
black eye sat in the center of her face, but Light knew she could see much more than he. She did
not bend her head down to focus on his small body.
“You have come without warning,” Valiant said. Her voice was soft, comfortable. Light
remembered listening to that voice during long forgotten adventures to unexplored regions of a
younger galaxy.
“I have,” Light said. “Much like how Earth was destroyed without warning.”
“That,” Valiant said, “is old news.”
Light was taken aback. “How do you mean?” His memories of Mikihel vanished.
“Earth is dead,” Valiant said, raising a massive arm, directing Light’s attention to a screen
the size of a city. Sol burned deep red on the screen, spewing its bright radiation to the rest of the
ancient solar system. The original solar system. Mercury and Venus had been spared their original
fate, moved from Sol to become moons of Jupiter. Earth had been moved to Saturn with Mars, two
garden planets kept alive by the technological prowess of ancient humans.
Saturn appeared onscreen, the rings noticeably larger. Earth’s final fate.
“As you can see, Earth is now the dust that makes up Saturn’s outer rings. It has been this
way for thirty thousand years now, Light, and there is nothing we can do, other than let go. Be
glad that this happened now, not when our ancient ancestors were just beginning to explore the
galaxy.”
“Who killed Earth?” Light asked.
“No one knows,” Valiant said, easing her arm back on its rest.
“There’s no evidence?”
“There’s no one to look,” Valiant replied. “And you’re not going to either, love.” He made
no reaction to her goading.
“And if I do?” he asked.
“You won’t. You’re not going to make the journey. It’s forty thousand years to Sol from
here. You’ll get there, spend two days piecing together the ‘mystery,’ and then sleep through the
fifty-five-thousand-year journey back. You’ll have been away from home for a hundred thousand
years, and you’ll realize you hated every minute of it.”
Light bristled. “I can handle waiting,” he said. “I had to sit in that chair for five million
years, connected to that awful machine. You’ll be wanting out soon, and your reign has only just
begun.”
“Oh, Light,” came her reply, dripping with pity. “I am different than you. I’ve been looking
forward to this ever since you left it empty. I can now see why you loved this chair more than me.
I know everything now Light, and I can lead the galaxy to greater heights than you can imagine.”
The conversation would become nothing but insults, now. Light Unto the Darkness Eternal,
the four hundred and eighth Premiere, turned and left the presence of Valiant Into the Night, the
four hundred and thirty sixth.
“I made time to spend all day with you, love,” Valiant called out to him. There was no
longing in her voice. Light made no reply. He found his ship and departed Orion.
The forty-thousand-year journey to Sol lasted only a second to Light. The conversation
with Valiant angered him, and he wished to be home as soon as he could. Media gathered over
forty millennia flooded his mind, taking five minutes for him to sort through and digest what he
thought important. Almost no news was about the fate of the Earth, and what little there was lay
the blame on the Premiere for not safeguarding the planet. Not one soul in the galaxy offered an
explanation, or demanded an investigation.
No one in the galaxy had visited Sol or Earth for millions of years. Light Unto the Darkness
Eternal had been to Earth once in his long life, long before he had been Premiere and allowed to
change his name, back when he had been known as Kenn’i Doran, before meeting Mikihel, before
making his grid planet and calling it home. Earth had bored him. Powerful generators dotted the
planet, to keep it shielded and safe from the massive radiation put out by Sol. Other than the
generators, no technology or humans were allowed to be on the planet. One of the very first
Premieres, before the sun had ballooned into a red giant, had decreed Earth to be left alone to its
own devices, to allow the cycle of nature to be kept as pure as possible. Nobody wanted to live on
the ruined planet anyway, and left it alone, preferring to make planets and stars to their own liking.
Such things were easier to make from scratch than using old pieces.
Earth’s destruction was absolute. Saturn’s rings had grown, the dust of Earth absorbed over
the past hundred thousand years. Nothing was left to investigate. Repeated scans from Light’s ship
offered no clues to the destruction; no satellites had survived. But perhaps…
The ship’s cameras focused on a world covered in orange haze and dark oceans: Titan,
Saturn’s largest moon, before Earth and Mars had been forcibly planted into orbit. Scans probed
the surface for facilities that might have been watching the sky during Earth’s destruction, but
found nothing. Titan’s buildings faced downward, into the surface of rock and ice, underneath the
oceans of methane and ethane. Mars became the new target, a large ocean spread across its surface,
with smatterings of green and red reaching up to the white poles. There were craters, thousands of
craters, peppered across the surface, marking where parts of the Earth had landed. The ship found
an observatory that had survived the fiery stellar rain, scanned for images of Earth’s destruction,
and found them.
Light Unto the Darkness Eternal stared at the first frame of the recording. He did not know
what he would see, and was scared it might reveal an enemy, an intelligence he knew nothing
about. Another human would be easy to take care of, but an alien intelligence that could reduce a
planet to dust was a threat to the galaxy.
Light began the video.
The Earth rotated on its axis, and orbited the yellow gas giant seen behind it. Everything
was perfectly normal. White clouds raced across its surface, stormy in some areas, wispy in others.
Oceans reflected blue light, and even green where the algae bloomed. Polar ice reached out with
frigid fingers over land and sea, seeking to prevent spring. On the dark side of the planet, cities
and towns lit up the land in tiny grids, populating unfamiliar continents and countries.
If Light had lungs, his breath might have caught in his throat. If he had a heart, it might
have skipped a beat. The muscles in his legs might have become weak, and he would have had to
reach out an arm to grab anything to steady himself. But he was a man inhabiting a machine, and
the machine did not falter. His mind lost focus, and he forgot why he had come to such a faraway
place, thinking that it was home. Earth was no longer his home. Earth had never been his home.
Earth was home to a new species that had evolved in the randomness of nature. The planet
belonged to a new set of DNA, arisen out of millions of mutations to become aware, to shape their
destiny.
Light watched in horror as this young species chose their fate. One of the generators that
kept the planet alive lit up, becoming a flare on the surface. Everything within a thousand miles
around the generator was reduced to ash, and then the ash disappeared into nothingness. The light
intensified and grew larger, its sphere of destruction blooming like a flower. The destruction
around the explosion touched another generator; a new light blossomed, erasing cities and towns
and countries under its petals of heat and concussion, seeking another generator to caress. Each
generator that met its doom found three others to ignite, and this continued until the entire planet
was covered in points of light that turned land gray, erased oceans, and burned away clouds. Great
bolts of lightning began leaping between the boils of light, and the gigantic explosions continued
to grow, ravenously eating up earth and ash.
After several minutes of inching their way across the surface, two of the explosions met,
and became columns of rock and debris ejecting into the atmosphere and further, into space. The
force of this new explosion began ripping apart the planet, hastening the demise. More connections
were made by the explosions from the generators, and Earth began disintegrating. The crust of the
Earth buckled, and splintered off the surface, slowly at first, and then all at once. Continents,
mountains, the ocean floors, ejected into space, tumbling, ripping themselves apart. Some of the
points of light were torn from the surface as well, demolishing the earth that carried them into dust.
Many explosions remained on the planet, however. The generators, powerful machines that create
magnetic fields and supply power to the planet, had been placed over the surface and throughout
the layers of the planet. The destruction of one had meant the destruction of them all, and the end
of the planet.
Light watched the recording in its entirety for several days. The mantle and cores of Earth
took longer than the crust to be destroyed, but their fate was unavoidable. The generators continued
their destruction as new ones caught fire, and the joining of two explosions always ejected matter
into space. Nothing larger than a home ever left the surface. The destruction was absolute. The
destruction was perfect.
The destruction was as if it had been planned, long ago, by the humans that had moved
Earth to Saturn to preserve it.
The recording continued to play long after the final generator lost its light, and Earth was
no more. A great cloud of dust covered the sky, and grew closer. Mars passed through the remains
of its sister, and the sky began to fall with a fury not seen since the very beginning of Sol’s life.
Droplets of burning rock pockmarked Mars surface, setting the surface ablaze with wildfires in its
oxygen rich atmosphere. The Mars outside Light’s star ship had recovered, but the recording
showed a hellscape that burned the planet every time its orbit forced it through the dust that had
been Earth. The falling rocks had hit Mars’ generators, but they did not ignite like they had on
Earth.
Light waved the recording away, and found the schematics for the ancient generators. They
were indestructible, able to withstand earthquakes, crushing pressure, molten rock, and asteroids.
They only had one weakness: tampering. Only intelligent beings can spark the generators.
Grief overcame Light, and he imagined naïve creatures poking the generator with primitive
computers, to see what would happen. He thought about the gap of time between their destruction
and his visit. A hundred thousand years. In that amount of time, they would have been crawling
all over the Sol system, itching to get out among the stars.
Light studied the generators on Mars, and others throughout the solar system. All were
meant to start a chain reaction when tampered with. Whoever had made these wanted to ensure
that nothing ever truly left the system, to compete with humanity for the galaxy. The generators
reminded Light of antibiotics, programmed to destroy any potential disease. No date was given for
installation, and no names, companies, or manufactures were listed on the maintenance logs. Only
the schematics were available; any investigators would know for certain that the destruction had
been intentional, planned more than a billion years in the past.
Light sat down, and began preparations to send a message to the galaxy. He stopped
midway. He went over the news that had washed over him the past hundred thousand years, back
to Earth’s destruction, and realized the truth.
The galaxy did not care. Light had been the first person in the Sol system in over four
million years. The galaxy did not care about the destruction of a planet when a new one could be
made in a matter of years, and a star for that planet in a matter of centuries.
Earth no longer mattered. Earth had not mattered for millions of years. The sparkling blue
planet had been a seed for the galaxy, and now that the galaxy was in full bloom, Earth was no
more than a husk, the cracked and buried seed pod of a vibrant flower that spanned a hundred
thousand light years.
After several months of orbiting Saturn, Light Unto the Darkness Eternal concluded that
he did not care. He could not bring the Earth back, and he could not punish the ones responsible
for its destruction: the ancient humans and the ignorant species that had set off the chain reaction.
The loss of a new intelligent species was saddening, but there will be more yet. The life on Mars
looked promising.
Light considered detouring to Orion on his journey back home, to report to the Premiere
what he had found. Instead, he sent a short message, with Mars’ observatory recording attached.
“I have found the cause,” he said. “And there is nothing to be done about it. I recommend sending
an engineer to Mars and Titan to deactivate the functions of the generators that allow them to
destroy planets, so that any future life that evolves on them won’t meet the same fate as Earth.”
He wondered if there would be enough time for another species to evolve into intelligence before
Sol blossomed into a supernova. Perhaps the planets could be moved to a younger, kinder star. He
would let the Premiere decide. The Sol system no longer concerned him; it never had.
Light did not distort his sense of time as he traveled home. For fifty-five thousand years,
he enjoyed reading and watching the galaxy, an organism in constant evolution.