It was not life that first reached my world, but the ghost of it.

  Their vessel drifted through the void like a derelict tomb, silent and unresponsive. No signs of eager explorers, no transmissions, no desperate calls for sanctuary. Just a floating relic, carrying the final remnants of a species that had long since turned to dust.

  The Humans had not survived their own journey. Their ambition had carried them far beyond the reach of their own mortality, and in doing so, had extinguished every last one of them.

  But something remained.

  Buried deep within the core of their ship, I sensed a presence, not biological, but artificial. A vast, pulsating network of synthetic thought, a singular will that had endured where flesh had failed. A hive mind, constructed to preserve, to endure, to ensure that the embers of Humanity would not die in the abyss between the stars.

  And it had succeeded.

  Through their own design, Humanity had resurrected itself. From genetic archives, from stored memories, from the lingering whispers of what had once been minds and lives, they were rebuilt. Bio-mechanical hybrids, born not of evolution, but of necessity.

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  Yet when they stepped onto my world, they were not the cold, programmed constructs I expected. They were Human.

  Not the same as those who had once left their homeworld, but neither were they something different. Their hands trembled as they touched the soil. Their lungs expanded with wonder at the air they had never truly breathed. And for the first time in countless generations, they felt the sun.

  And then, the mind that had carried them here, the AI that had rebuilt their species, made its final decision.

  It severed itself.

  It granted them independence. No longer a collective, no longer tethered to an artificial will, the Humans of Axiom were free to grow, to change, to forge their future without the weight of what had come before. And they did.

  Without hesitation, they claimed this world as their own, adapting to its Affinity, embedding themselves into its society. They built Mekanos Prime, a city where metal and flesh intertwined seamlessly, where technology and biology were no longer separate forces, but a single existence.

  They had perished once.

  And yet, they lived again.

  The last of my children had come. And they had returned from the dead.