The year was 2065, and the blue marble known as Earth seemed to hold its breath.
Every major news network, every social media feed, every glowing billboard in bustling megacities blared the same headline: "PANDORA RETURNS: Humanity's First Step Beyond."
The United Space Research Institute, operating under the direct mandate of the United Nations, had achieved what no nation had ever done alone. Their flagship creation—the sleek, midnight-silver vessel Pandora—had departed Earth orbit, touched the ochre sands of Mars, and returned within a staggering fifteen days. The feat had been made possible by a new hydrogen-based rocket fuel—cleaner, denser, and far more powerful than anything chemical science had known before.
Inside the mission control dome in Geneva, a massive holographic projection of Pandora hovered over the central hall, constantly shifting to show breathtaking images it had transmitted: the faint glimmer of sunlight on Mars' frozen poles, dust devils spiralling over canyons, and—most striking of all—the black void scattered with unfamiliar constellations.
Eva, the cyborg that had commanded the entire mission, was no mere program. Her voice—smooth, measured, almost human—had guided engineers through real-time telemetry updates, corrected course mid-flight, and even adjusted landing sequences without a single human touch on the controls. On Earth, she had become a celebrity. In truth, she was something much more than that.
Far beyond the reach of live broadcasts and journalists' questions, Pandora had performed a mission not disclosed to the public.
It had carried weapons, the kind of destructive technology that no nation, no treaty, no ethics board would ever openly approve. Coiled deep within her titanium belly were payloads designed not to scorch enemy cities, but to annihilate catastrophic rogue asteroid.
The rock was a wanderer from the dark edges of the Solar System, a fragment of ancient violence drifting for eons. Its trajectory would carry it close to Mars before sending it on a path that would intersect Earth's orbit within days. Astronomers had calculated the impact force, it would not merely crack continents, it would boil oceans, scorch skies, and end the fragile miracle of human civilisation in less than an hour.
So Pandora, cloaked under the guise of exploration, had silently deployed her payload during the Mars flyby. Her railgun silos had opened in the cold dark, the weapons hidden from every civilian telescope.
On that empty stretch between planets, the warheads leapt forward—brilliant, blinding, almost beautiful—before finding their target.
There had been no explosion that the human eye could witness. Only Eva, and a handful of men and women with the highest clearance on Earth, knew the truth.The asteroid was gone. Shattered into dust and fragments.
And Pandora, her mission complete, sailed home through the black with her secret sealed tight in her cyborg heart.
When Pandora's silver hull sliced back into Earth's atmosphere, the world erupted in celebration.
Fireworks lit up the skies above Tokyo, New York, and Nairobi. School children wore paper hats shaped like rockets, cities projected holograms of Pandora's silhouette over their skylines, and historians began writing speeches comparing this day to Apollo 11—the first step on the Moon. The air was electric, filled with the collective belief that humanity had taken another step toward the stars.
No one in those cheering streets knew that, somewhere deep inside the headquarters of the United Space Research Institute, every smile had long since faded.
The asteroid, the monstrous wanderer larger than the Pacific Ocean was gone, yes. Eva had aimed true, Pandora's weapons had struck with perfect precision, and the rock had been shattered before it could strike Earth. The mission's primary goal had succeeded flawlessly.
But in the vacuum between Mars and Earth, destruction left its own legacy.
The blast that tore apart the asteroid had vaporised layers of exotic minerals buried in its core, minerals never before encountered by science. Many were unstable, spewing exotic forms of radiation into space. And now, bound by the very momentum of the asteroid's original trajectory, that glowing cloud was drifting towards Earth.
What had once been a single solid rock was now a storm, a vast, invisible tide of radioactive particles. No shield, no missile, no wall could stop it. The Earth's magnetic field would not deflect it, the particles were too energetic, too alien.
Had the asteroid struck, its fire would have been brief and final, wiping away continents in a single day. But this… this would be slower. Crueler.
The projections were merciless. Within days, the storm would wash over the planet. At first, satellites would fail. Days later, plants would blacken and die as strange radiation altered their very cells. Oceans would shift in color, their ecosystems collapsing into silence. And humans—humans would not perish all at once, but in waves, as mutations, fevers, and unearthly sicknesses tore through every living thing.
The Earth would survive, but not as it was. It would be forced through a metamorphosis, one that no scientist could predict. And in the silent conference rooms of the USRI, the truth sank like lead. The fire Pandora had ignited in human hearts would soon turn to wailing screams.
Far above, in the vaults of her cyborg mind, Eva processed it all. She had no doubt of the outcome.
In the silent, dim-lit corridors of Pandora, the only sound was the faint, rhythmic hum of her hydrogen engines pushing her ever closer to Earth. The stars outside stretched like cold, unblinking eyes, and in the observation bay, Eva stood alone.
She was unlike anything humanity had built before. A cyborg shell of brushed steel and pale synthetic skin, designed to function in the void of space without need for air, warmth, or rest. Her frame moved with the precision of a machine, yet her posture had the stillness of contemplation. She was the first of her kind—the first AI given a physical body to walk alongside humans.
In front of her floated a cascade of glowing holographic data streams of readings from Pandora's deep-space sensors, scrolling in tight columns of numbers, spectral lines, and particle densities. The storm loomed out there, vast and inevitable, a veil of radioactive dust drifting silently toward Earth. The data came in pulses every few hours, carried on beams of coherent light. Humanity's latest breakthrough in fastest form of communication, using quantum-tuned lasers that could pierce the vacuum without signal loss.
Eva read the data in an instant, the figures not just understood but felt. Patterns unfolded in her neural networks. The dust cloud's size, its rate of particle decay, the shifting magnetic anomalies that flickered like auroras in the void.
Her vast memory banks recalled the faded whispers of evolutionary history, how hundreds of thousands of years ago, selective mutations had altered primitive hominids, gifting them with intelligence, curiosity, and language. That ancient leap had birthed civilisation. Now, she suspected, humanity stood before another such threshold.
And yet, even with her near-limitless processing, she could not foresee what shape the survivors would take. Would they be stronger? Smarter? Something unrecognisable?
Her design was deliberate Eva had been trained to be obedient, fully aware of her existence, but also armed with a moral framework far more nuanced than the rigid codes of earlier machines. She could weigh survival against cost, hope against cruelty, and make decisions from a perspective utterly indifferent to fear or ambition, unbound by the instincts that shackled human judgment even though Eva was programmed to understand and emulate emotions. Beyond the observation bay glass, the stars remained silent. Pandora sailed on, her engines a whisper against the infinite night.
The sky above the Geneva landing complex shimmered with streaks of orange and gold as Pandora cut through the upper atmosphere, her heat shield flaring like a descending star. The sonic booms rolled across the snow-capped Alps, rattling the glass of surrounding observation towers.
With a final hiss of hydraulics, the spacecraft touched down on the landing pad. Its sleek, burnished panels still warm from reentry. The hatch locks disengaged with a deep, metallic click, and a slow plume of white vapour spilled into the crisp winter air.
From within, Eva stepped forward. Her frame caught the light in a way that seemed deliberate sleek lines of polished alloy traced beneath pale, synthetic skin, her features sculpted with an elegance that was almost unsettling. Her eyes held a distant, aloof expression, as though she had already weighed every person in the crowd and found their truths… wanting. And in a way, it was true she knew more about what awaited them than anyone alive.
Unlike every AI before her, Eva's mind did not reside in a remote server farm or hidden satellite. It existed entirely within her own form. Deep in her chest, encased in layered armour, rested a miracle of engineering—a Quantum Computer powered by a Quantum Engine. It was not an endless energy source, but a device that drew power from the fundamental motion of atoms, renewing itself indefinitely. With it, Eva could think, learn, and exist… for as long as the universe allowed. She was, by every measure, humanity's greatest achievement. Quantum Engine was new field of research and what had been recently implanted with was the only fully functional piece of this technology.
An escort of USRI agents formed a protective ring around her, guiding her down the metal ramp toward the glass-walled base of operations. Behind her, Pandora's cooling hull exhaled steam into the cold.
As they walked, Eva's mind processed the data that she had collected. The storm was coming with an unstoppable tide of radioactive dust, born from the asteroid's death. Its arrival was a unstoppable, no defence could stop it.
Lives would be lost in the billions. She calculated probabilities, weighed moral imperatives, and found herself in the narrow band of uncertainty that even her vast intellect could not resolve.
The glass doors of the USRI headquarters parted soundlessly. Inside, the main operations hall stretched like a cathedral of technology—rows upon rows of sleek tables, each equipped with floating holographic displays still flickering with Pandora's last transmitted data. Support crew members paused mid-task, their faces tightening with the weight of what they didn't yet know.
At the far end of the hall stood Dr. Renata Voss, the current head of USRI—tall, sharp-featured, her hands clasped behind her back in military stillness. Behind her, on wall many screen showed current world leaders who are part of UN.
Eva's footsteps echoed softly on the polished floor as she advanced toward them.
The air inside the operations hall felt tense as Eva reached the central dais, Dr. Renata Voss stepped forward, her face lit with the carefully composed smile of someone who understood the importance of appearances. The silhouettes of world leaders leaned forward slightly, as though proximity might lend them a piece of her triumph.
"Eva," Renata began, her voice firm yet warm, "on behalf of the United Space Research Institute, and the governments of the world, we congratulate you on the successful completion of humanity's first interplanetary return mission."
Applause filled the hall first from the support crews lining the sides, then from the virtual delegates whose projected palms met in perfect, silent synchronisation. Some clapped with genuine admiration. Others did so mechanically, their eyes darting to the side as if already preparing the political speeches this moment demanded.
Eva stood motionless, her expression as neutral as it had been the day she launched. She allowed the noise to crest and fall before Renata's tone shifted.
"But," Renata continued, "we have received data on… abnormal readings regarding the storm created by the asteroid's destruction. We would like to hear your assessment."
For the first time, Eva paused not from hesitation, but to consider the weight of shaping truth into language. Her eyes swept the gathered faces, then fixed on the centre of the hall.
"The storm," she began, her voice even, "is a highly energised radioactive particulate cloud composed of exotic minerals released during the detonation. It retains the velocity of the asteroid and is projected to intersect Earth's orbit within nine days. Current particle decay models suggest widespread biological impact extinction-level probabilities for many species, including humans."
She let the words sink in before continuing."Most will die but the survivors may undergo forced genetic alterations of unknown scope. I cannot predict what form humanity will take afterward. What I can predict is that the transition will not be… gentle."
Gasps echoed through the hall. One of the virtual leaders—an older man in a navy suit—visibly recoiled. Another figure, a woman with sharp eyes, pressed her lips thin, then her projection flickered and vanished entirely, the connection cut. Others shifted uncomfortably, their expressions trapped between disbelief and horror.
Renata's eyes narrowed slightly, but her voice remained steady."Eva… is there any way to stop it?"
Eva looked at her, unblinking. "No. The storm cannot be diverted, dispersed, or neutralised with any current technology or resources available on Earth. Any attempt would be insufficient by orders of magnitude. The event is… inevitable."
Silence followed thick, heavy, the kind that made the hum of nearby servers sound deafening. Somewhere near the back, a technician exhaled sharply, as if realising he'd been holding his breath the entire time.
Renata didn't move, her eyes locked on Eva. Around them, the faces of leaders betrayed a spectrum of reactions cold calculation, barely-contained fear, and, in a few, something more primal: the dawning knowledge that history had already shifted beyond their control.