After hearing everything, Arnaldo leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and drifted into thought. His own words echoed in his mind – “You were created with the mission to save Earth,” and “This is a duty, a responsibility entrusted to each of us.” Only now did he truly understand: neither of them had ever chosen to be born this way, let alone bear such an immense burden without the right to refuse. Would he himself have accepted such a fate, had he been born into the same circumstances?
The answer was no. Absolutely not. He wasn’t even sure he could have survived pain of that magnitude.
The realization gnawed at him relentlessly. He didn’t know how to atone for the mistake he had made. The room fell into silence, the two of them staring into the pitch-black void ahead without exchanging a single word. The universe suddenly felt vast beyond measure – cold, desolate, and unbearably lonely.
Tuan eventually stood up and quietly returned to his quarters, leaving Arnaldo alone in the control room. He, too, carried countless unspoken burdens. Dr. Tiên’s death had left a void that could not be healed in a day or two. Entering his room, he collapsed onto the bed and finally let the tears fall.
Having escaped death’s grasp, the spacecraft ELE-SP006 now carried the last three human beings of Earth’s civilization. And each of them bore a weight of sorrow too heavy to ever be fully spoken aloud.
***
“Landing sequence in three… two… one. Touchdown confirmed.”
The aft hatch of the spacecraft slid open, and the boarding ramp slowly descended. Three small human figures, encased in heavy EVA suits, took their very first steps out into open space. They had landed directly on the airstrip of the Titan Satellite Observation Station – one of the many facilities constructed under the ELE-VII campaign. The United Nations Space Agency (UNSA), in cooperation with L.A.B, had successfully launched an interstellar vessel carrying numerous construction robots to Titan to build this base.
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The station’s primary purpose was to monitor, analyze, and gradually terraform the satellite’s environment in preparation for future human migration. However, L.A.B had quietly transformed this place into an off-world Negalis research facility.
Physicists at L.A.B had once expressed serious concerns that stockpiling Negalis beyond a critical threshold could give rise to anomaly bubbles – zones in which all matter inside would completely vanish. This fear sparked intense debate over whether the new energy source should replace fusion power in aerospace engineering.
Yet over time, experimental spacecraft continued to accumulate increasingly large quantities of Negalis without encountering any major incidents. That alone was enough to convince L.A.B of the energy source’s safety, paving the way for the successful construction of an acceleration gate in outer space. The device was capable of instantly absorbing and releasing Negalis the moment a spacecraft entered it, propelling the vessel forward at velocities comparable to the speed of light.
After completing its assigned mission, the experimental ship remained stationed on Titan, silently stockpiling Negalis for years on end, waiting for the day humanity would return to put it to use. That long-held hope was finally fulfilled when the last remnants of Earth’s civilization found one another again. From that moment on, the spacecraft was officially entrusted with an entirely new mission – to become the launchpad from which humanity’s hopes would soar across the galaxy.
The moment they touched down, all three of them could already see their new home. The interstellar vessel designated ELE-SP013 was the most advanced spacecraft ever built by humankind. It was three times the size of ELE-SP006. Aerospace engineers had drawn inspiration from the orbital motion of electrons around an atomic nucleus, designing a spacecraft with three massive rings continuously rotating around a central hull. Each ring served a distinct function, together forming a closed-loop ecosystem that would allow future generations of humanity to live and work safely beyond Earth.
