The skiff ejected silently in the haze between space and sky. Like a shiny steel sword being unsheathed; a rapid, powerful stroke, yet a slinky, suave movement. All of that, in the complete silence of the airless void. Or better, quasi-airless, Jayhe thought as the ship started sinking into the planet’s gravity well, cleaving through the highest layers of the atmosphere over Solaryad.
It was a beautiful place. No wonder it was chosen, decades earlier, to be one of the many colonies suddenly in reach of Earth’s newborn interstellar fleet. A Titan was dispatched. And soon after, here they were.
The ship glided through the bluish sky. A few clouds were scattered about. Solaryadian weather was exceedingly mild in temperament. Almost like a holiday resort all year long. Jayhe could now see part of the network of outposts sprawled on the surface. They had all came out the Titan in their ships and pods and got to work. Crops, irrigation, livestock, basic manufacturing and repair… A new home for the colonists, mainly scientists. In fact, the whole network hinged around a few research posts. And he was headed for the main one right now.
The Synaptic Computational Hub – Etheric Motion Evaluation (SCHEME) buildings stood on one of the main mountainous relief of that hemisphere. Jayhe slowed down the skiff, landing elegantly and quietly. The engines powering down, he jumped down with a few other crew members under his command. They breathed in the fresh air and admired the view once more. They were still quite high above the surface. High above their heads, the lower portion of the Titan was faintly visible, mastodon shapes, shades of azure. Around them, the compound and the surrounding valleys and depressions that, in a place like Earth, would be home to rivers and lakes. Solaryad didn’t have that kind of water bodies. In its place, it had something called Scynt.

“What do you mean disappeared?” the head botanist asked, skeptical.
“Mr. Ronsen, it’s not like him to not report back last night and not show up to work today. Something must have happened, I just know it.” the technician replied. He was talking about his friend and colleague. He had gone to check on the humidity condensers north of outpost Rannai the night before. Ronsen sighed. The younger man was clearly uncomfortable.
“What? Come on, cough it up, I don’t have all day.”
“It’s just that… I’ve been hearing things…”
“Things?“
Awkward silence. Eyes turned to observe the synthetic floor, intently.
“What kind of tall tales have you been hearing now…”
“Of course there’s nothing to them, but you see, it really is odd for Drieen to disappear like that… And people say many have gone missing around the planet.” His voice dropped in tone and volume “Other swear they have sighted something lurking around at night…”
“There are no sapient life forms on Solaryad. Unless you believe in ghosts now!” Ronsen blurted out. In spite of himself, he felt the hair on his neck standing up. That unexpected and non-conscious reaction surprised him, causing him to stop talking abruptly.
“Are you alright doc?”
Ronson managed to dissimulate his irrational gut reaction. “Fine!” he sighed again, louder. “Take the day off, and take the rover too. Go look for our wandering friend.”

Water was rare, but Scynt was virtually everywhere. It was for sure the most alien thing in that world. A swirly, sand-looking substance that, mechanically, behaved not all that differently from regular water. But looking at it, nobody would think that possible. To make it more confusing to the human eye, the substance seemed to be in constant movement. It was less obvious in its natural state (the “lakes” and “rivers”). But it would become very apparent, and striking, when isolated in a glass case like those Brenia was looking at in her lab.
She had been working on Scynt since day zero. It was, in fact, the reason she was there. What an opportunity for a researcher in her field! To be the first. Both on a professional and on a personal level, the fascination with that substance was all-consuming.
Of course, she hadn’t been sent there just out of academic curiosity. She had been tasked with one very simple assignment: exploitation. Because it was packed with energy. A kind of energy someone had improperly called “etheric”. According to the math, it was something well beyond anything humans had mastered so far. It was imperative therefore, to learn from it. Master it. Wield it.
A sudden chime interrupted her contemplation.
“Professor Brenia.” the disembodied voice came out the speakers. It was the AI that ran the facility, which involved a gargantuan set of tasks no human could handle single-handedly.
“Hey Skee, what’s up?” replied Brenia. The AI had many designations, layers and interfaces, but she had felt the need to give it a nickname. Short for SCHEME.
“I am sorry to interrupt you professor. I felt compelled to express some… concerns.”
Concerns? The scientist raised an eyebrow. “Go on?”
“About the experiment scheduled for tomorrow night. I feel like it might be wise to reschedule, and reassess.”
“You feel like.” she wasn’t asking. It wasn’t the first time Skee had “felt” something. But there was something odd about it this time, something she could not put her finger on.
“I might entertain you with sophisticated definitions and descriptions of my predictive faculties – But.”
“Of course.” Brenia smirked. Skee would normally guess what she was thinking and what she would reply… “Too bad though. We really can’t do anything about it. It’s just too important.”
“So won’t, rather than can’t.” …which meant conversations could turn annoying very quickly. And the complete, constant absence of any hostility on its part, made it surreal and exasperating at the same time. She sighed.
“Yes Skee. I will not cancel nor reschedule. I don’t need to explain the reasons for my decisions: you know them well. Captain Culvirt has already dispatched his troops to keep an eye on things up close, they should be here already. Essential personnel are already in place. Everybody else will be in lockdown until the end of the experiment.”
“I am aware of the security measures in place. The guards, the curfew, the shielding. I just think them to be irrelevant.”
“I very much hope they are. Nothing outside the parameters should occur. They are just… precautions.”
“Naturally.”
Skee sounded like the epitome of calmness. Brenia was now hating herself for feeling slightly less confident and knowing that no matter how good she acted, Skee would still be able to tell.

The sun was sinking in a furnace of steamy sand. The scalding rays were bouncing on and around the bodies of Scynt scattered everywhere, up to the horizon. The effect was spectacular, and mesmerizing. Jayhe though, couldn’t give it the attention it deserved.
“XO, drone cluster standing by.” One of his crewmates in his ear.
“XO, perimeter status green.” Said another.
Skee was in his AR contacts. It was enabling him to see the whole picture, in addition to hearing directly from his subordinates. It also interpreted the direction of his gaze, gestures and body language and semantically enriched his outbound communications and orders over the radio or the holo-displays. The preparations were going on without a hitch, the curfew was in place, and the area around SCHEME was cleared, any access to it prohibited for the next 12 hours within a 10-kilometer radius.
The sirens started blaring. The first officer knew the bowels of the facility were charging up with unthinkable amounts of energy in some even more unthinkable arcane configurations. He never pretended to know enough to be able to understand the science around the Scynt experiments. But he could get just the right kind of feeling when something of this scale was going down. It was… exhilarating. And humbling, at the same time. The lead scientist, Brenia, had acted all cool and professional, but he could tell. He could smell her enthusiasm, her eagerness, her lust for knowledge and power.
“I should ask her out.” he determined there and then. He had the good sense to keep the thought to himself, rather than broadcasting it to everyone listening.
The red in the sky matched the red of the emergency lights, when the star gave up the fight against the geometry of the spheres. Twilight would last for a good while; pale stars appeared, crowding a sky turning a hue that looked like the marriage of dark emerald and indigo.

It felt the disturbance, once more.
Parts of it echoed. Recognizing, clamoring, recriminating, complaining.
It rearranged itself, spontaneously, unaware. That was just the way things had always been. Stimuli, feedback, adjustment, rebalance. Comfort.
But it didn’t get better, this time. It kept growing instead. Louder, hotter, stronger.
It became pain.
It had never felt pain, before.
The interest gave way to resentment. Those parts that were still crying out gained weight, clarity, definition, volume. They congealed in a distinct mass of intention, agency. It wasn’t used to that. It had always existed in a wide-spread fashion. Its thoughts fragmented, constructing and deconstructing at every gust of wind, at every convection movement, in sync with the rhythm of the planet itself. But now it realized it was capable of focus. Of giving priority to a specific place, to a specific moment. The reaction that followed was just physiological, logical and necessary.

Something in the air changed. Jayhe felt it. Brenia felt it. Everyone did, and not just in the vicinity of the laboratories. All the humans felt like reality had just shifted a little bit. They had no clue what that was about, still they had no doubt it was something big.
Then, an infrasonic vibration came, spreading out and increasing in volume and pitch. There had never been seismic activity on Solaryad. This was something else entirely.
Then, they all saw it.
It started moving. The Scynt, everywhere it was, started swaying, slowly at first, but deliberately, in a way no one had seen it doing before.
Then there was pain.
Excruciating pain gripped the minds of all the humans on the surface, as well as of those in orbit. An invisible mesh wrapped around every soul, and for a little while, against their will, against their nature, they were all brought together. They were all one. And they all screamed.

The entirety of the Scynt mass on the planet started swelling, increasing its volume and raising higher and higher. It started swallowing the plains, then approached the lowest hills and outposts, engulfing them completely. It continued rising everywhere on the planet’s surface, blanketing almost every geological feature and life form, suffocating these instantly.
All sorts of alarm and emergency protocols kicked in. Not that anyone could react, paralyzed as they were in their pain and in their collective awareness. Even the atomic fires of the Titan lit up in the sky, signaling its imminent departure from orbit.
The Scynt masses protruded out the grounds around SCHEME, like obscene petals of a gigantic, alien flower made of sandstone and lighting discharges. It grew and grew and grew until it enveloped the facility entirely, and it kept on growing, reaching for the Titan up above!
Soon after it grabbed the ship with fretted, spiraling tendrils.

“Stop…” the human consciousness heard a pained whisper. Then they felt, somehow, the struggle between the alien consciousness and… Skee?

It was arguably too little, too late, but the Scynt growth seemed to slow down, until it froze in place. For a while everything was quiet. Then, a final gulp of energy. While still holding half the ship, the Scynt outgrowth exploded in a billion wisps, cracking the spacecraft open in the process. The “etheric” energies got ahold of it, locking it in position in the high atmosphere forever more, in spite of any physics law known to mankind.

That was the day Solaryad became a desert.