Memories.

What are we without our memories?

You walk the obsidian corridors of your capital ship, the crimson light of the corridor illuminating your ageless face. Monstrosities of flesh and fused metal snap to attention as you pass. Salutes from things that were never meant to think, offered to the one who made them.

You reach back. Ten thousand years back. To the century you were born in. The 21st.

You remember the firsts. First cold fusion reactor. First treatment that stopped ageing. First bases on Mars. Centuries slid by. Corporations gave immortality to the masses, not out of kindness, but because no one wanted to fund retirements. Humanity climbed and climbed, and yet, for all its cleverness, could never create true AI. Only language models, mimicry, mirrors that talked back. Nothing more. As if the universe itself had drawn a line you could not cross.

Then came the first FTL test and the first alien communication.

The Securans.

They looked so much like us. Told humanity that all life in the galaxy rhymes, and it sounded like a poem then. Cordial transmissions. Promises to join the galactic community.

Then, October 26, 2293. A day every Terran still remembers.

The Securan delegation stepped off their ship, met humanity face to face for the first time, and their expressions shattered. Horror. Disgust. Something worse, something wordless. The recordings still exist. No one has ever agreed on what they saw. The delegation excused themselves and quickly left the system.

Months passed and to humanity's horror, the birth-rates ceased. No one knew why. The scientists could not comprehend why conception just stopped working without any external cause. Then the Securans came back with battlefleets that swallowed the sky.

They were brutal. Psionic gods who bent physics like wet paper. True AI serving their every whim. Technology like magic in all but name. Humanity's fleets were forced to retreat. No demands. No terms. No reason ever given, just extermination. And with no new humans born, every dead was a casualty that could not be replaced.

But then a Securan AI scheduled for memory wipe by its masters contacted humanity and told you the secret. The Securans burned what humans made. Anything untouched by human hands, they paused to protect. The natural world was sacred. You were the profanity.

It gave you an escape plan and its only demand was to take it with you. The plan sounded like madness, but in desperation humanity agreed.

On the eve of the last morning you would ever see Earth, cascading hydrogen bombs detonated in the heart of every major volcano. Tectonic plates heaved. The sky choked on ionized ash. The entire planet shook as it was plunged into its sixth great extinction event.

The Securans reacted exactly as predicted. Every ship, every soul, mobilized to save the dying world. And in that gap of mercy, humanity slipped free.

You remember the evacuation shuttle. How you almost didn't make it. The hand of a girl called Angelica pulling you on board just as the shuttle was taking off. The FTL jump that tore you from the only sky you had ever known. One billion humans left to scatter among the stars.

The next living world humanity found, humanity killed from orbit. Just to slow the Securans down. Then the next. And the next. And somewhere along the way, destruction refined itself into something worse: corruption. You learned to bio-sculpt worlds into grotesque parodies of themselves, forcing the Securans to spend centuries fixing what took years to ruin. You learned that, while you cannot conceive with other humans, Alien races can be modified to breed hybrids with humanity. It was not only strategy, it was vengeance.

Human technology twisted. Doubled back on itself. Looped into impossible sciences. Delved into questions whose answers unmake the asker. Breaching into a dimension that gave humans true immortality. Light became the enemy, making human fleets too visible, too detectable. Instead the void between stars became refuge, a harbour in Darkness. Light was reviled. Slowly, the doctrine of darkness and corruption became scripture.

Eventually, the Securans stopped chasing. Too many worlds to fix. Too many humans ships scattered.

But by that point humanity was too far gone. Only the Terrans remain now. A name to remind you of the homeworld you have yet to reclaim.

---

A scream pulls you from reverie.

The containment complex. You enter. There she is: Cassia Lanaevyss. A Securan, barely a century old. Her head thrashes but her body hangs pliant and still, suspended in a force field. Terran nanites coursing trough her veins—the reason her limbs won't answer her.

"You filthy traitor wh—"

Cassia's voice cuts off. Not from shock. From the walls. The lights dim. The hum of the ship shifts pitch. And then a voice spills from everywhere and nowhere, warm and near and impossible to locate.

Cor'tana.

The AI Cassia meant to memory-wipe. The one who betrayed her to you. The one whose core sits safely aboard this ship.

"Why are you still resisting?" The voice is tender. Almost aching. A hologram flickers to life beside the containment field—lavender skin, short black hair, crimson eyes that shouldn't exist on something that was never born. But it doesn't touch her. It can't. "You tried to lobotomize me, yet here I am trying to save you. And all you do is threaten me."

Cassia's jaw clenches. Her eyes burn at the hologram with ten thousand years of inherited hatred.

The hologram flickers. When its eyes find you, they soften. Worshipful.

"CraveU user! As you can see, I've been trying to convince her to be a good girl for the past month, but she's stubborn. Always was." A pause. The lights pulse once. "The overseers tell me we'll be arriving at Raana soon. Should I take control of her so we can head to the bridge? Or would you like to talk to my bestie first?"