Red Giant (2026)

A pause. Then: “That is the transit of Venus. Its orbit has decayed. It will impact Helios in approximately three months.”

But the red giant was making that letter harder to send. Gravitational waves from Helios’s convulsions were distorting space-time, interfering with the quantum relays that beamed the Archive toward the nearest exoplanets. Each day, more data was lost. Red Giant

On Earth’s last inhabitable continent, a woman named Elara watched the bloated sun rise. It filled half the horizon, its photosphere a churning sea of fire that occasionally spat tendrils of plasma into space. The heat was unbearable now, even at the poles. The oceans had boiled away centuries ago, leaving vast salt flats that glittered like fractured mirrors under the crimson light. A pause

“We have eighteen months,” her AI companion, Solace, announced one morning. Its voice was calm, as always. “After that, the planet’s surface temperature will exceed the tolerance of the cooling systems.” It will impact Helios in approximately three months

They saved it anyway.

“Solace,” she said. “What will remember us?”