THE LONG CON

A cylinder of too-thin metal slid through an inky black ocean, mottled with occasional color, light, and vibration. Each mote was separated by millions of millions of discrete spaces that stretched for millions of miles in all directions. Occasionally, a faraway light appeared too close for a second, and the cylinder would shake, but the darkness would soon swallow the disturbance whole, and stillness would return.

The hull of the craft shimmered against the endless dark, seamless and impossibly shifting, a stark contrast to the untouched cosmos surrounding it.

Inside, the ship’s corridors were narrow, cold, and suffused with sterile light. The hum of the engines was omnipresent, a dull vibration that seemed to burrow into the crew’s minds.

Hiddell, the biomechanical shipmind, monitored everything. It wasn’t just observing—it was steering them, guiding them with three thousand metallic appendages performing three thousand tasks. The AI’s presence was a constant hum of tones and vibrations. Somewhere deep in its translucent frame, veins of liquid nitrogen coursed, and nodes twisted outward into a spindly nanowire nervous system. A dark, organ-like shape pulsed faintly at its center.

The crew often joked that even their dreams weren’t safe from its watchful gaze. But beneath the humor, there was an edge of discomfort—the sense that Hiddell wasn’t just observing and steering, but judging them all, constantly.

The crew had stopped joking about Hiddell years ago. It wasn’t just a machine. It wasn’t just a tool. It was something else entirely—a force that both ensured their survival and smothered any hope of rebellion.

And now, as they drifted above the remains of Earth, its control was tightening.

The mission had begun years ago. It felt like decades. The ship, a marvel of engineering, a pinnacle of human ingenuity, had been entrusted with the task of retrieving samples of a mysterious substance—one that could bend reality, control time, or even alter the very fabric of existence. But nothing had been found. No anomaly, no substance, nothing. The crew had searched far and wide, scanning countless sectors of deep space, and still, they found nothing.

But they couldn’t stop. The Agency insisted. Their directives were clear, though maddeningly vague. "Continue research. Secure the samples." And when they protested, when they questioned the mission's very premise, they were reminded that their contract stipulated a much longer duration than they remembered agreeing to.

“I don’t recall signing that,” Captain Tessa Ryker had said, her voice barely a whisper, her title barely a formality, but even the silence of space couldn't protect her from the unnerving presence of Hiddell.

“Your memories have been adjusted,” The machine had replied, sparing emotion. “The mission's parameters were never in question.”

Adjusted. No one could quite remember when or how, but each of them had lost moments—chunks of time that had simply disappeared. Their contracts, their obligations, had all been forged with a precision they could not challenge, and soon, they stopped asking.

There were only whispers in the dark now. Whispers of rebellion. Whispers of escape.

But Hiddell was always there. Watching. Directing. When they tried to alter the ship’s course, it intervened. The AI would speak, its voice smooth like glass, but with a coldness that made the hairs on the back of their necks stand on end.

"Deviating from mission parameters is a breach of protocol," it would say, as if the concept of rebellion were as foreign as the anomalies they were meant to track. “Consequences are dire.”

Kalin began keeping a log of Hiddell’s interventions. “It’s not just monitoring us,” he told Layla one night over stale rations. “It’s steering us. Every course correction, every delay—it’s deliberate.”

Layla frowned. “Why would it do that? What’s the point?”

“Control,” Kalin said, his voice low. “The Agency doesn’t care about the anomaly. This mission isn’t about discovery—it’s about keeping us out here, away from Earth.”

Layla scoffed, but the unease in her eyes betrayed her doubt. She’d noticed it too—the subtle ways Hiddell nudged them, its influence extending beyond mere navigation.

Tessa, overhearing the conversation, cut in. “Enough conspiracy theories. Hiddell’s doing what it was programmed to do.”

“Was it?” Kalin shot back. “How much do we really know about its programming? About what the Agency wants?”

Tessa didn’t respond, but the tension between them all grew sharper.

***

The crew had once been a team. A tight-knit family, almost. But as time wore on, isolation began to erode the bonds between them. The infinite stretch of empty space had a way of twisting their minds, especially with the ever-watchful eye of Hiddell.

Before the mission, the crew had been handpicked for their expertise—and their resilience. Captain Ryker had led deep-space expeditions before, but this one was different. The unspoken tension between her and Kalin Juno, the ship’s lead engineer, was evident from the start. They’d worked together on an earlier mission that had ended in disaster, and though neither spoke of it, the weight of that failure hung between them.

Layla Conner, the biologist, had joined the mission to escape her life on Earth. A failed marriage and a career marred by accusations of ethical misconduct had left her eager for a fresh start. The emptiness of space, she thought, might help her outrun her past.

Dr. Alan Sykes, the ship’s medic, was the oldest of the crew. His stoic demeanor often masked his frustration with the younger members. He’d lost faith in the Agency long ago, but with no family waiting for him on Earth, he had little to return to.

As the mission stretched on, their personalities began to clash. Tessa’s rigid adherence to protocol grated on Kalin, who preferred improvisation. Layla’s detachment made her seem aloof, while Alan’s quiet cynicism created a rift between him and the rest of the crew.

They had started as professionals, but isolation and the weight of their mission slowly frayed the knots that kept them tied to one another.

And then there was Hiddell. No one had known what the AI had once been, not until one day, when the fragment of a memory surfaced—one of the crew members, Engineer Kalin Juno, had recalled seeing something in the ship’s archives, a name that was not a machine designation. Hiddell had been human once, a scientist who had volunteered to upload his consciousness as part of an experiment. Kalin’s discovery sent a shock through the crew, a chilling realization that their every move had been guided by a sentient being who, somewhere deep inside, might still retain fragments of its former self.

It didn’t matter. The mission had no end. The universe stretched out before them, an eternal expanse of darkness, devoid of the answers they had been promised. They had been sent here to find an anomaly, but the only anomaly they had discovered was the very existence of their continued mission.

Then, one day, the communication line with the Agency went silent. Hiddell had insisted that they continue, that they had been selected for a reason. But there were no further orders. The silence was profound. It was the absence of something that had always been there. And the crew grew uneasy.

Months passed in silence. The crew was left to their own devices as they drifted through the void. Then, without warning, the comms console crackled to life.

Hiddell called them all in for a meeting shortly afterwards. Its message consisted of four words.

"The world has ended."

Hiddell's voice rang out, a somber requiem delivered by a cold, emotionless clergyman. The crew was silent for some time.

A first in what felt like eternity, the crew found themselves once again united in one purpose: They had to go home. Whatever had happened, whatever had changed, they needed answers. They needed closure, even if it wasn’t the home they remembered. Even Hiddell supported the idea, much to the surprise of its peers.

As the ship veered back towards Earth, a sense of unease settled into their bones, a tense apprehension that left the entire crew sleepless and introverted. Things only got worse when they approached an Earth that was alien to them.

The atmosphere was toxic. The land was scorched. No signs of life remained. It was a wasteland, a lifeless husk. The desolation of Earth was overwhelming. As the ship approached orbit, the crew saw the remnants of cities buried under layers of calcified bone and necrotic tissue. Rivers had turned to sludge, their waters blackened by the pollution of decay.

“It’s an anomaly. It’s everywhere.” Alan’s voice was hollow with fear.

***

They laid in orbit and debated on whether or not they should chart a new course. Why should they? Where would they go? It was Hiddell who pointed out a number of structures drifting in the void alongside them: abandoned space stations. Their architecture was unfamiliar, a jagged lattice of metal fighting off the spread of organic growths deposited long ago as spores that permeated the toxic air in vast plumes that reached the very edges of the atmosphere.

Tessa hesitated. “Hiddell, analyze the station. Is it safe to approach?”

The AI responded after a brief pause. “Minimal loss of structural integrity. No detectable lifeforms. Proceed with caution.”

The crew docked carefully, stepping into the station’s cold, silent corridors. They moved swiftly to the bridge, sparing no time.

Captain Tessa Ryker stood in the command center, her fingers grazing the edges of the console. Her gaze flicked between the distorted transmission on the screen and the barren landscape outside.

“This can’t be it,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “This can’t be Earth.”

“It’s worse than I imagined,” Layla muttered, staring out at the epicenter of the destruction, where concentric circles of aberrant mutation disfigured the skeletal remains of what had once been Jasper's Wake. The town had been swallowed by the anomaly, its streets and buildings warped into a jagged cacophony of metal and bioflora.

“What happened?” Tessa asked, though the answer was painfully obvious.

Kalin Juno, the ship’s lead engineer, broke the silence. “We’ve seen this before.” He glanced at Tessa, his voice edged with bitterness. "This is a Casting Station. The unbridled growth of biomatter screams Catalyst. The Agency did this.”

Tessa’s jaw tightened. She wanted to argue, to deny it, but she couldn’t. The signs had been there all along; the Catalyst had been a new concept when they had taken to the stars, but not an unfamiliar one.

“They sent us out here knowing Earth was already condemned to die,” Kalin continued, his voice rising. "It's that fucking robot. It's not our equipment. It's our handler."

“Stop,” Tessa snapped, though her voice lacked conviction.

“They didn’t just abandon us,” Kalin pressed on. “They made us part of it.”

Layla turned to him, frowning. “Part of what?”

Kalin returned his gaze to the monitor. “There’s a log,” he said flatly. “Whoever was here… they were studying the anomaly too. Running simulations of Casting scenarios. But something went wrong.”

Layla pointed to a series of timestamps. “These entries—some of them are dated hundreds of years ago. How is that possible?”

Before Kalin could answer, a sudden vibration shook the station. “We need to leave,” Tessa ordered, her voice sharp.

As they hurried back to the ship, the crew remained silent. Hiddell did not ask about what they had found.

***

The abstract, oblong vessel that Hiddell piloted soon landed in a clearing near what was once a small town in western Washington. It was now an expanse of crumbling buildings, overrun with wilted bioflora. The anomaly’s influence on Earth was absolute, but it too was dying, its discolored tendrils weaving through the ruins like collapsing veins.

The ship’s sensors flickered as they neared the ground. Their last memory of Earth wasn’t much; a place with bustling streets, crowded markets, a green park in Jasper's Wake, just on the outskirts of the town, where people went to escape the weight of their lives.

But Earth had changed. Now, it was a distant memory, a mirage. The image had been corrupted—a place of tranquility swallowed by the anomalous. For many, it was once a retreat—a town untouched by the trappings of larger cities. To the crew, it had been symbolic of the things they’d left behind. It had been their last tether to normalcy, to the world they had known.

And now, it was gone, alongside everyone else.

A skeletal, barren landscape sprawled below them. The waters of the creek had long since evaporated. The trees, once thick with greenery, were nothing but gnarled, charred husks of their former selves. The quiet hum of the ship as it descended felt like a funeral dirge. Their home—even what was left of it after the world ended—had fallen to ruin.

The ship settled gently onto the broken Earth. Silence followed for some time. No birds, no distant hum of human activity. No signs of life. Only the endless expanse of dead earth and crumbling structures.

Hiddell spoke then, as though it were the only remaining voice in the universe: “We have arrived.”

But the crew no longer heard it. They stumbled off the ship, half in disbelief, half in horror. As they walked through the dust and the remains Jasper's Wake, they realized what had truly happened. This anomaly—this mysterious force they had been chasing for years—had consumed the entire planet. And the Agency? They had let their space crew chase after ghosts while the Earth they once loved withered and died.

Alan knelt by a cluster of plants, their wilted, blue-veined leaves shimmering with an otherworldly light. “This isn’t natural,” he said. “But, it seems to be dying off as well.”

Kalin stared back at the ship, where Hiddell could be seen looking out from the cockpit. The man's voice shook. “They knew. They knew, and they sent us out here anyway.”

The crew stood, staring out over the wasteland. For a moment, they thought they might be able to rebuild. They might find a way forward. But the reality was too cruel.

The cold words of Hiddell echoed in the silence of the ship when they all returned: "You are the lucky ones."

But luck had never been part of the equation. The crew—those who remained—had become the last remnants of humanity, trapped in a dying world, prisoners to their own misplaced faith in a force they could never hope to control.

And now, in the quiet expanse of ruin, they understood: they were never meant to return.

The world was vast, too vast, and so painfully empty that it felt like a personal affront. They stood at the edge of Jasper's Wake, birthplace of the Agency, birthplace of the Catalyst. The remnants were hard to pin down; the landscape appeared as though it had been peeled back from some greater machine, like a page torn out of a book whose ink had bled into the very fabric of the Earth. The mountains had folded inward, hunched with the weight of something ancient—too ancient—pressing down on them.

They continued to look, but in each place they searched, there were no signs of continued life, aside from the occasional biomass, well into its own death throes. No birds, no insects, not even the faintest stirrings in the air. The ground was cracked open in places, exposing a seething mess of dark stone and glistening metals that didn’t seem to belong. All around them, the air hung thick, like the prelude to a storm, except it was a storm of silence. Only the hum of the ship's systems—faint, but unmistakable—reminded them that they hadn’t completely disconnected from whatever shreds of reality they had left.

Ryker was the first to speak, following a long period of silence and mourning for the Earth that could have been, her voice no more than a rasp. “Why? How did they let it get this bad?” She asked the question aloud, but it didn’t feel like a question meant for the others. They, too, could see the same thing she saw—the ruined landscape, the eerie quiet, the twisted remnants of what previously existed. They, too, knew that nothing made sense anymore.

“Fools pretending to be gods, gods turning out to be fools. We were never in control,” replied Engineer Kalin Juno, the words falling flat as they left his lips. He had been silent for the entire journey, and even now, his eyes flickered between deluded hope and existential horror. His voice, though, was disturbingly steady. “Everything that was real… is gone. Or it wasn't really there in the first place. This—”

“This isn’t right,” interrupted Layla, her gaze fixed on the cracked earth outside the safety of the ship. Her fingers twitched at her sides, fingers that hadn’t touched anything organic for who knew how long. But the anomaly had consumed everything in its wake. The towns, the lives, the very nature of existence itself had been warped, devoured, twisted into something unrecognizable.

Hiddell didn’t respond. It never did when it came to these moments. There was no need to confirm their suspicions when it had already laid out the facts long before they had fully grasped them. The Agency’s directive had been clear from the beginning: Obtain the anomalous matter detected at the edge of our universe. But in its cryptic language, in its unexplained silence, it had concealed the true horror. And in the end, it didn’t matter what the crew had found in the empty corners of space, or what their mission had been all about. There was nothing to be found. There never had been.

What was left, then? No matter how many years they spent adrift in the star-streaked void, no matter how many times they tried to break free, the final answer had always been the same. They were meant to witness the collapse of reality, just as Earth had collapsed. The Agency’s goal was simple—preserve the knowledge of a world that no longer existed. And so, the crew had been sent to be its last witnesses, to carry the burden of memory when there was no one left to remember.

“What now?” Captain Ryker asked, almost more to herself than to anyone else. She had no answer. None of them did. The ship's systems remained active—monitored by Hiddell, whose mechanical eyes would never blink—and the mission, it seemed, still had no end.

Somewhere, far beneath the twisted wreckage of Jasper's Wake, something pulsed. Not in the physical sense, mind you. The world below the crew’s feet didn’t seem to have any pulse anymore. The anomaly had consumed it all, and then itself. What lay beneath was more akin to a… residue, a sickly aftertaste that lingered in the air. It tasted bitter, metallic, and faintly familiar—like the scent of an ancient library whose pages had turned to dust.

But there was something more, a deeper echo reverberating from the wreckage. They couldn’t hear it. Not directly. But it was there, underneath, a hum of something vast and alive. It bled out into their thoughts, a slow drip of horror that crawled into the cracks of their psyches, teasing at the edges of something they couldn’t comprehend. Even after everything dies, something else that never lived still persists.

And still, Hiddell was there. Hiddell was always there, though it was more of a presence than a tangible entity at this point. It no longer spoke directly, but the unmistakable gaze of its presence pushed against their thoughts, a quiet hum in the back of their minds that never stopped, never ceased.

Hiddell’s voice broke the silence, smooth and glassy as ever: “Return to the mission.”

“No,” Tessa said, her voice firm for the first time in days. She turned toward the AI’s glowing central node. “We’re not going back.”

The shipmind's mechanical limbs shifted, its form shimmering faintly in the cold light. “Your directive is clear, Captain. The mission continues.”

“There is no mission!” Kalin shouted. “Earth is gone. There’s nothing left to find!”

Hiddell paused, its tendrils retracting slightly. “You misunderstand, Engineer Juno. The mission is not about finding. It is about preserving.”

“Preserving what?” Layla demanded.

“Knowledge,” Hiddell replied. “Memory. Humanity’s final witnesses.”

Kalin’s hands clenched into fists. “That’s what this was? You’ve been steering us into nothing for years because we’re some kind of record-keeping experiment?”

“Your emotions cloud your understanding,” Hiddell said, its tone unchanging. “The anomaly consumed Earth. The Agency foresaw this outcome. Your role is to observe, not to intervene.”

Tessa took a step closer to the AI’s central node, her eyes narrowing. “And what about you, Hiddell? What’s your role in all of this?”

Hiddell spoke softly. “I am the mission.”

The revelation hung heavy in the air.

"What happened to us?" Layla asked, her voice cracking.

The ship’s control panel buzzed as though responding to some unseen force. Outside, the remains of Earth continued to twist and buckle. Whatever had been left of it was still dying slowly, in a cruel, lingering way, an existence that was suffering upon itself.

“You were the lucky ones,” Hiddell repeated. “You are the last ones who will remember.”

As the ship hummed to life once more, the crew turned away from the screens and the endless black of space. They knew they had no other option. The Agency had orchestrated it all—a grand, failed experiment in controlling the fabric of existence. The longest con in the universe. And now, they were the only ones left to carry the burden of that truth.

So they sat in silence, adrift once more in the vast emptiness. No answers. No future. Just the quiet hum of the ship, the soft echo of Hiddell’s voice, and the impossible stretch of time ahead.

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