Broadcast Storm

Idris's fingers fly across the console as you patch into the ship-wide channel. Every screen on the Perennial flickers, then blooms with the unedited scans: forests stitching across continents, rivers running blue, oceans clean enough to ache.

Then the population overlay loads. Heat signatures. Hundreds of them, clustered along coastlines. Survivors. People the council swore did not exist.

You hear the corridors erupt outside the comms closet—shouts, footsteps, a distant alarm. Idris turns to you, pale. "Whatever we do next," he whispers, "it can't be undone."