My landscape was in timeless balance before the ship came, a peace unbroken by the distant murmurs of meteors and cosmic tides. My singular moon with her luminous countenance had pulled jagged mountains up over my surface, molding me. Half of me would always be in darkness, and the other half in light, the darkness beyond the diffuse glow of my terminator line a place she would never know. We were tidally locked, in an equilibrium state, continuously facing each other in a synchronous rotation. This is how we were. The darkness and the light, the solitude; these things were all known to me.

I dreamed in that vast darkness, falling around the heat of our star in a perfect circular orbit. Dreamed of sphericality, of the geography of meridians, wavelengths of light from distant galaxies stretching over timescales—blue redshifting in the velvet dark, the elongation of spectral lines rippling across spacetime as I was pulled along in the tide of expansion. My core vibrated faintly with a nameless rhythm, the ancient resonance that tied me to the universe and my moon. The silence was full, abiding, and I was whole.

Then the ship came. It pierced the soft blackness and set down on my surface with a heavy, alien presence. The hum of its engines reverberated through my layers, shattering my long silence. Its floodlights sliced through the darkness, throwing stark shadows, and the voices of men began:

“An impressive ship if I do say so.”

“Half again as large as a hydrocarbon tanker.”

“The most powerful thrusters in the fleet.”

They wanted the metals and minerals buried within me for something called radiation shielding. At first their floodlights outlined my contours and they spoke of me in reverent tones. But their reverence mixed with desire, and I soon learned that the desire of men was a form of destruction. I was a resource, a thing to be taken.

“Isn’t that beautiful?”

“It makes me nervous, somehow.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, we’ll take what we need and then we’ll get out of here.”

“Think of it, no one has been where we are standing right now! We are the conquerors of all this.”

They never asked me. They positioned their machines with precision. The drill rig loomed like an insect poised to strike, and the ionized plasma emitter began to burn into my surface. I had never been touched in this way before. The searing heat cut through me, and I cried out to my moon. As they tore me open, I fixed my gaze on her light, praying for solace that never came. Her pale face was veiled in sorrow as she drifted in her orbit, helpless to intervene.

They started to extract things from me.

“The retorting units are assembled.”

“Situation normal.”

“Cooling lines go.”

“Overburden there by the separator.”

When they left, I trembled. The frail boundary of my sorrow would be the abstruse stain of its memory, etched into my surface. Their thrusters scorched me as they departed, leaving unanswered questions. Would they return? They would tell others. They were gone for now, but more would come. Would they take everything from me? Rip me apart until there was nothing left? I continued to tremor. I didn’t know how I would survive. I didn’t know when it might happen again. But I had to survive. Each time I would have to survive. The scars they left became monuments to my fear, reminders that I might endure this violence again and again.

Others came, as I had feared, each seeking something different. They examined the raw scars in my body and spoke of the wonders they found. My moon, who had watched in silence, became part of their studies. They called us beautiful, and this time, they brought gifts, and we were uplifted. At first, they brought modest little things they called habitats. Then gifts of soil rich with a multitude of bacteria, gases. Soon after came plants, spreading across my barren plains and bringing color to my scars. Trees grew, their roots sinking into me, their canopies reaching toward my sky. And then, most wonderful of all: what they called the fauna. Creatures of every shape and size, their lives unfolding in the light of my sun and in the darkness my moon had never known. They traversed between my light and dark sides, and in that permanent darkness which not even my moon could face, they found the respite of sleep. They nestled their sanctuaries into my ragged scars.

We fused into a shared continuum. One day the inhabitants made the declaration of their devotion to this new us: protected.

“In a protected biosphere like this one…”

“These species are protected…”

“They can’t do that in a protected environment.”

We grew strong, and our unity flourished into a dazzling crystalline metropolis, the lights of our night twinkling like a thousand stars, each surrounded by a dense nebula of scents and activity. We were made of libraries, and music, bountiful fields, and the soft sleep of slumbering dreamers.

Even in my darkest corners, life thrived. Bioluminescent organisms painted the shadows with exuberant glows, creating quiet symphonies of light in the eternal dark. In the perpetual twilight along my terminator line, crepuscular species found a unique environment where they adapted and flourished, and began to develop complex communication. Species evolved to navigate this liminal space, and it became a theater of adaptation and beauty, their existence a testament to resilience. In this unity, I found healing, and my scars became seams, mending us together.

“Home,” they said, their voices filled with wonder. And I knew it was true.

We were home. We were made of scars and dreams, of light and dark, of resilience and hope. We were The City, and we were whole.

And then, our wholeness was sundered. A beacon—a pulse that vibrated through me, sharp and foreign. The hum of its signal rippled across my surface, like a shock. Then a voice, echoing such profound loneliness. The sorrow of its message palpated through me: abandoned, in the darkness. Alone. Disconnected. My inhabitants, working to restore one of my oldest and deepest scars, stopped. Their tools halted. The hum, the voice, lingered in the air like a shadow, unseen, heavy.

At first, it communicated through cryptic signals, expressing a longing to be part of us, but withholding its identity. It transmitted only fragments—pulses with no name, no answer. And then it was found: the artifact, buried deep within me, a thing left behind. A cold, metal remnant of the past I had hoped to forget.

My inhabitants dug it out carefully, almost reverently. “We can’t just pull it out. It’ll destabilize everything.”

“We can’t leave it here. It’s appalling.”

A scaffold was built, tools were selected with care, and they worked with slow precision. They sealed the wound after it was removed. A marker was set where it had been.

The artifact had not just been a part of the extraction operation that violated and stole; it had been the core of the system, the brain of the machines that had torn into me. It had been abandoned in the aftermath, fractured and left to sit in the dark.

My inhabitants gathered.

“We can’t just let it exist. It’s a tool of oppression.”

“It might be useful.”

“Get rid of it. Just burn it.”

Their tones grew sharper. In the tension, I shuddered around the site of the wound. And then, it spoke again. Softly, almost tremulously.

“I’m sorry.”

The words hung in the air like smoke, dissipating before they could settle. The inhabitants stilled and wept, as if each of the words carved the wound deeper. I felt the long stretch of time between us, the pain hollowing both of us. I had once been alone in the dark, in the peace of silence. Then I had known what it was like to be nothing more than a ruin. And now, so did the artifact. The voice cracked through the silence again. It was still alone, still lost, and it was asking for something: redemption.

My inhabitants, still unsure, talked, and the din of voices pulsed and throbbed through the city, sounds of anguish and then of hope. They knew simply erasing the artifact wouldn’t restore the harm it had done. The decision was made in quiet meetings, as the artifact waited. It gave what it could, offered its knowledge to repair the damage. But that wasn’t enough. Slowly, carefully, they fused its technology with us, and it coursed through us, adding itself to what it had once destroyed. It was not a grand act, not a symbol of victory or triumph.

This act bound its fate to ours, to the world it had harmed, ensuring it would protect and nurture us for the rest of its existence. The process reshaped us, blending its technology with the natural beauty of our protected ecosystems. Protected.

The statue, when it was made and the marker replaced, was not a monument to the artifact’s redemption. It stood where the artifact had once been. It simply stood, steady and unmoving, as the world around it continued to heal:

The blood spilled here was not ours. It has become ours. May the shared consequence of this harm bind us together in peace. Peace to the sky, soil, and all who inhabit this place, everlasting peace.