People_are_meddling_in_our_affairs Online

Henderson stumbled out into the red dust, his flashlight beam dancing wildly. He found the entire colony standing in the dark, silent and still.

"They aren't just meddling," Elias replied, his voice low. "They’re trying to turn us back into the things we ran away from."

Elias, our oldest engineer, wiped grease onto a rag. "Our children can fix a life-support turbine blindfolded, Henderson. They don’t have 'drift.' They have calluses." people_are_meddling_in_our_affairs

"You told us our ways were inefficient," Elias said calmly. "So we’ve decided to practice the ultimate efficiency. We’re reclaiming our silence." "You can't just cut us off!" Henderson sputtered.

"It's for your own protection," the lead observer, a man named Henderson, said as he poked a sensor into our communal hydroponics bay. "We’ve noticed your nitrogen levels are slightly off-protocol. It could lead to cognitive drift in the children." Henderson stumbled out into the red dust, his

The breaking point wasn't the nitrogen or the voting. It was the "Heritage Assessment." Henderson decided that our oral histories—the stories we told of the Great Migration and the First Frost—were "factually inconsistent" with Earth’s central archives. He began editing our schoolbooks, scrubbing the names of the rebels who founded Vesta-4.

The colony at Vesta-4 didn't have a fence, but it had an understanding. We were the "Quiet Ones," a collection of families who had traded Earth’s constant digital noise for the red dust and silence of the asteroid belt. For twenty years, our affairs were our own. Then the "Observers" arrived. "They’re trying to turn us back into the

That was the night the lights went out. Not just in the mess hall, but across the entire UED landing module.