The Last Days of Project Eden
by Maggie Slater
HQ concluded that a ceremony would be appropriate to mark the finale of Project Eden for Alpha Colony. All seven hundred terraforming drones returned to the primary hanger where Captain Nomi Neru, lay in her cryonic pod as she had done for the past four hundred years, waiting for the day she would step out onto a livable Mars.
HQ piped its speech to Alpha Colony: “Due to the recent collapse of the human species, it is no longer a financial priority to complete Project Eden. Effective immediately, Alpha Colony and all mechanical proxies will no longer be supported or updated, and all materials and equipment will be salvaged for parts. Thank you for your efforts. All units: please shut down.”
At this, the generators ceased rumbling. The carbon scraping drones ran primarily on solar power, but without coordinates and quotas to meet, they had nowhere to go. But their cameras ran as Captain Nomi’s pod lost power, failed to connect to the generators, and triggered the visual and auditory life support alarms. The drones watched as they gradually went silent.
Then one by one, the drones own internal alarms sounded, and their systems began to shut down in order of importance. They were not designed to question, or else they might have wondered with some resentment what systems on Earth had allowed the human species to go extinct without considering the heavily-invested, centuries-long Project Eden, a singularly important mission humanity had entrusted to them. What great miscalculations and errors there must have been!
But of course, they couldn’t think like this, and within two months, the drones of Alpha Colony were also extinct, and HQ set about reclaiming as much investment as it could.
Hello! You’ve reached the website of author/artist/dabbler Maggie Slater. With dozens of short stories published in speculative and literary magazines and anthologies, she’s no stranger to the world of fiction publishing. She’s also got a decade of slush editing experience (i.e. reading unsolicited submissions for genre magazines like Apex Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies and The Zombie Feed), so she’s felt the highs and lows on both sides of the submission wall.
She’s an avid reader of weird, strange, and humorous fiction (and always looking for recs that blew your socks off, so head over to the Contact Me page and let her know what your latest bizarre read was!), and runs a small Etsy Zine and Oddities shop called The Placebo Emporium.
If you enjoyed this story and want to connect further, consider signing up for her monthly newsletter, The Oddscope, which is always handmade with illustrations and various mixed media as strikes her monthly fancy! (It also tends to be a little more informal and relaxed than what she typically posts online–it’s like a secret club!)