I’m sorry. There is a problem with our system. Please remain calm. We are working to resolve it quickly. Her Sp-ACE kept repeating itself no matter who she called.

Holographs atop buildings and on street signs said the same thing:

I’m sorry. There is a problem with our system. Please remain calm. We are working to resolve it quickly.

Elaine ran down the streets as fast as she could. She stopped every time she saw a tipped-over pod, but found that not a single one of her neighbors had survived. She had called the police, she had called the hospitals, but she kept getting the same message.

“Please state your emergency and help will arrive as soon as possible.”

“Something happened,” she said. “There was a power outage. It just… Everything went off. The Arkinee are dead! I need help. I can’t… I don’t know how to…”

How to what exactly?

Bring people back from the dead?

Even if help came, it was too late. She stopped in the middle of the street, surrounded by toppled pods and terrible silence. She clenched her trembling hands.

Somewhere through her own breath, too loud in her ears, she heard people yelling and screaming throughout the station. She ran towards that proof of life as fast as she could, away from the dead silence. In the next sector, she found people. Mostly Kreet, running through the streets in dazed confusion. They called out desperately to family members and friends.

Several shuttle cabs had crashed into the side rails along the deep, wide shuttle ways. Elaine held her breath as she neared the broken highway railings. If the flying shuttlecraft had lost power, not everyone would have been able to make a landing. On an airway that was nearly as deep as the station itself, that meant… She found herself staring down into the pit, the wreckage at the bottom so far away she couldn’t actually see it. But the emptiness of what had always been a constantly busy road was enough to confirm the worst. Those around her swore and cried. They made frantic calls much like her own, telling impartial software what had happened, trying to explain to a machine that loved ones were gone. Forever.

“Help!” The voice belonged to a human woman who was struggling to climb out of a crashed shuttle, one of the ‘lucky’ ones that had toppled sideways against the railing. The woman was trying to climb out the side door, now facing up, and the vehicle tilted dangerously under her weight.

“Hold still!” Elaine ran up to the woman. She wasn’t the only one answering a cry for help, there were so many of them through the station now. Her head buzzed as her translator tried to pick up everyone, turning the sound around her into an echo of white noise punctuated by too-loud voices. She braced her foot against the base of the shuttle way rails and reached over toward the shuttle. “Is there anyone else inside?”

The woman shook her head.

“Take my hand.” They grabbed each other’s wrists tightly. Elaine leaned back as the shuttle started shifting. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you!”

As the woman steadied her feet for the jump, the shuttle rocked and started sliding into the abyss. “Jump!” Elaine shouted, jerking hard. The woman tumbled toward her, falling onto the hard street as the cab vanished over the lip of the highway.

“Are you okay?”

The woman nodded. “I-I’m fine. Thank you.” She stood slowly. “What happened?

“I don’t know,” said Elaine. “The power went out.”

The woman pressed her palm to her temple and blinked rapidly. Elaine noticed a cybernetic flash to her eyes, an almost pinkish light. Maybe to others, the artificial eye matched the woman’s natural one, but to Elaine, the intricate chinjk work glowed, pulsing faintly before fizzling out. “You need a hospital.”

“I’m fine. My vision implant went out when the shuttle did. But I can handle it, I’m a nurse. We need to get everyone- “

Elaine spun and ran down the street.

“Where are you going?” the nurse cried out behind her.

“My friend has a heart condition!"

"Hold on! Wait for me!”

He’d warned her about the Wipe. He’d stood there in his kitchen and told her exactly what would happen.

“Before first contact on my planet, there was a Wipe. It took out all our tech, electronic, digital, anything above basic electricity. It will happen again.… Any time someone comes close to discovering Artificial Intelligence.”

The pleasant nighttime walk that she had enjoyed only hours before turned into a frantic run, taking every half-formed thought, every last breath she had, as she came to the house. “Mr. Josefp?” The door swished open for her. “Mr. Josefp?”

His body lay in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor. She should help, she should do something. But all she could manage was to dig her fingernails around the edge of the countertop and come no closer, because if she didn’t hold onto something she might fall into some dark hole. A hole that, in her head, surrounded those that were dead, and it wanted to take her too.

A weird rhythmic sound grew louder and louder, like a too-quick heartbeat, but it was only footsteps. The woman Elaine had rescued appeared in the doorway briefly, before hurrying to the body. She scanned for signs of life with her Sp-ACE, and finding nothing, pressed her fingertips to Mr. Josefp’s wrist.

“He had an artificial heart,” Elaine whispered.

“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said.

What was anyone supposed to say to that? Elaine looked away as the nurse tried to contact more medical teams, some kind of help. “I don’t understand…” Her friends. The power. It had only been off a moment. What if power went out in the Sea too? Her stomach tightened. She didn’t know she could feel any sicker. “I-I have to check on something.” She ran out the door, past the terrarium, and toward the highway.

What if the Engern are dead too? Elaine hurried down the street until she found a shuttle that wasn’t crashed. She slid into the seat and passed her wrist over the console chip, hoping her emergency ID would be active by now. It denied her the first time but worked on the second swipe. “Sector 10, inner docking 12,” she told the shuttle program.

As the shuttle swept into the chasm-like highway, she felt her stomach do a somersault. What if it all goes out again? What had used to be an ever-moving highway was empty now, save for the emergency vehicles that sometimes appeared on her level, only to swoop downward, checking to find survivors amid the wreckage below.

She couldn’t imagine it happening again, but she also realized how foolish that was. She had no evidence that she was safe here. For all she knew, this disaster was galaxy wide, or other power stations had also been hit. If the Engern, were dead, the station would lose everything; every job here, all the restaurants, entertainment, museums, and colleges were only here because this station was the power source for the worlds around it. Please be alive, please be alive.

When she finally reached her destination in the inner sectors, where houses were larger, and shops more refined, she jumped out of her shuttle and ran for the viewing windows. Along the streets, even the important and well-to-do were suffering, crying in fear and mourning lost friends. She had a fuzzy sort of awareness about it all. Her vision seemed to darken around the edges, and she could only focus on what was directly in front of her.

Her heart pounded as she stopped in front of a wide, five-story high window. Here on the inner side of the station, all windows looked in at the Engern Sea, a beautiful ocean of light. Swimming in that vast sea of light were the Engern. Alive. Their precious power-giving scales shimmered in various shapes and patterns. Some of the creatures were as small as her hand, others larger than shuttles. They swam in the energy around them like it was water, giant tails carrying plump, bulbus bodies driven by arrow-sharp heads. To her eyes it was a calming dance of pinks, blues, and light greens, an ocean of energy that pulsed and moved with life.

She pressed her hands to the window, then laid her forehead against it, breathing out slowly, and realizing only now how light-headed she felt. At least they’re okay.

She found herself truly exhausted, shaking. She sank to the floor and pressed her back against the window like it might shield the Engern somehow, before putting her head in her hands. I need to do something.

“Do you need help?” a voice asked.

Elaine jerked her head up and stared at the stranger. They were tall, with teal skin and near-white eyes. She registered this, and recognized it as unusual, even for people on the station. She didn’t recognize the species, but she did recognize the uniform. She stood up quickly.

“I’m fine,” she blurted. She hadn’t seen an Investigator since school. Investigators and agents were trained on the same campus, but at the warning of her roommates, she’d never really interacted with them. Death Detectives, they were sometimes called. People who, like her, had abilities, strangely natural and yet ridiculously rare.

“G-go haunt someone else,” she stuttered.

The Detective cocked their head to the side, perhaps waiting for their translator to catch up. “Haunt?”

Elaine flushed, bracing herself against the window for support. Today was too hard. Everything. Too hard to handle. She found herself wanting to burst into tears, but that only seemed to make the alien more concerned.

Elaine worried the Investigator might read her behavior as something suspicious or criminal. The thought that they could rip all her memories out of her very soul was terrifying. “Don’t touch me.”

“I’m not,” the Investigator said. Mirror-like eyes seemed creepily appropriate for someone with such an ability. It was unsettling. The rest of what they said didn’t translate, and she wished they would just walk away.

Finally, the alien complied. Raising two fingers of a six fingered hand in some sort of sign and backing off.

She took a shaky breath and wiped her eyes on her sleeves. Pull yourself together. She looked back out toward the Engern. They’re okay. I’m okay. Now she just needed to do her part. Needed to help, to fix everything. She looked at the Engern one last time. “It’s going to be okay,” she promised.

She opened a display on her Sp-ACE. It was updating every few minutes with new notifications and her normally-assigned work area had been canceled, allowing her easy access to the entire station as needed.

The topmost notification requested that all agents even lightly trained in Medical chinjk report to the nearest hospital. That kind of work was a little too unsettling for her, so she’d never gotten medical training.

She pressed the filter to her level and skill set and tapped the biome needs selection. Her extended range revealed several emergency spots that needed repair and she responded to a couple. She’d stop at the nearest gathering center for more chinjk, since she was so near the Sea right now. There would be a growing risk of black-market pirates stealing it, even with the emergency laws in place.

She could do this. The list of instructions, of actions she could take, was comforting. It gave her focus. She’d do everything she possibly could to fix this mess, starting by helping the biomes: areas with people who had delicate living arrangements. The nearest was Plague Sector 5. They were lucky and had their own agent, just not the chinjk supply to make repairs. She could at least do something for them.

As she walked back through the streets to her shuttle, she was all too aware of the bodies lining the streets. Humans, Kreet, Azmite, Nny... The Arkinee pods bothered her the most, though; every single one of them, through the whole station…dead. And that Death Detective who moved like a hooded ghost, stealing their memories.