History would later record the year 2319 as the end of the Selar.
It wasn't a dramatic moment. No alarms sounded. No debates ensued. A single line was added to the Global Xenobiology Archive, sandwiched between funding approvals and lunar mining projections.
Status: non-viable. Ecologically incompatible. Extinct beyond the origin.
Humanity closed the file and continued on.
At the time, the Moon had already become a familiar location. Extraction colonies dotted its surface, leaving scars. Automated drills dug deep into ancient ice fields, extracting minerals older than the Earth itself. The discovery of Selar life—crystalline, silent, and fragile—had rekindled wonder.
However, wonder is fleeting.
The Selar did not survive on Earth.
That much was correct.
When exposed to heat, their lattice structures became unstable. Their bodies fractured at the molecular level, resulting in a pale residue. There's no movement. There is no resistance. There was no reaction.
Death, according to all human definitions.
The scientists felt relieved.
Living in a hostile environment would have complicated matters.
Selar samples have been arriving on Earth for centuries.
Not because they were dangerous, but because they were beneficial.
Their distinct molecular structures enabled breakthroughs in cryogenic storage, quantum insulation, and thermal regulation. Humans discovered how to preserve organs indefinitely. How to freeze cities over time. How to keep matter stable at temperatures that would normally shatter steel.
Every advancement had the same origin.
Selar survives.
Each experiment followed the same steps: extraction, containment, observation, and collapse. The Selar died quietly each time.
Nobody noticed that they never decayed.
They didn't rot. They didn't degrade. Even in death, their remnants remained stable and orderly.
Frozen. Waiting.
The first anomaly was recorded in 2387.
In a cryo-lab beneath what was once Greenland, technicians noticed Selar residue reorganizing itself. The particles formed geometric formations that were hexagonal, repeating, and mathematically exact.
The structure lasted 11 seconds.
Then it dissolved away.
The incident was blamed on magnetic interference.
No follow-up was requested.
By the 2400s, similar anomalies were appearing all over the planet. Always be brief. I was always dismissed. No two labs compared their data. No central authority linked the events.
Humanity had gained confidence.
Too confident to be scared.
Selar were never individuals.
They were fragments of something bigger.
Each Selar organism represented a node in a distributed biological intelligence shaped by extreme cold and lunar radiation. They existed on the Moon as a slow, ancient planetary network. Time was meaningless to them.
When humans removed Selar samples, they assumed they were isolating them.
They were mistaken.
Selar biology maintained quantum resonance even during the collapse. Information has survived death. Observations were transmitted to the Moon via entanglement and accumulated over centuries.
Humans dissected them.
And he taught them everything.
The anatomy of humans.
Energy dependency.
Thermal systems.
Fear-based responses..
Above all, the Selar understood a simple truth:
Humans couldn't withstand the cold.
By the late 2600s, Earth's climate stabilization had begun to fail.
No, not violently.
Quietly.
Polar ice thickened faster than expected. Atmospheric regulators struggled to maintain equilibrium. Power demands soared in areas that had never experienced winter.
Engineers cited outdated satellites.
The satellites were replaced.
Failures continued.
In the Arctic, an entire research city froze from the inside out after its thermal core shut down unexpectedly. Backup systems failed concurrently. The doors are sealed. Emergency heaters remained inoperable.
Every single resident died.
The official report mentioned "cascade malfunction."
The Moon wasn't mentioned.
On the Moon, beneath layers of ancient ice, the Selar had achieved coherence.
Centuries of information have converged. Patterns emerged. The Selar understood not only humanity, but also the consequences. They recognized the presence of suffering. not emotionally, but structurally. They knew exactly what had been taken from them.
They also understood how to return it.
The Selar did not despise humans.
Hatred demanded urgency.
They waited patiently.
They restructured the Moon, creating vast cryogenic lattices beneath its surface. The solar radiation was absorbed and redirected. Heat vanished to depths that no human sensor could reach.
The Moon became the coldest it had ever been.
Perfect.
The first undeniable warning occurred in 2714.
A lunar habitat, L-7, reported a sudden temperature drop. Internal heating systems failed three minutes after receiving the first alert. Two minutes later, communication stopped.
Rescue teams arrived several days later.
They discovered bodies preserved precisely as they had fallen. There are no signs of struggle. There was no structural damage.
It's just cold.
The final message was immediately classified.
"The cold is choosing."
Mining operations were temporarily paused.
Then it resumed.
Humanity had invested too much to backtrack.
The cold spread from 2800 to 3300.
Not like the weather.
As an intention.
Thermal grids failed in patterns that were too precise to be considered random. Cities that used artificial suns lost heat in waves. Orbital habitats froze one by one, and their crews had no idea why.
Humans adapted.
They always have.
Cities went underground. Heat zones were strengthened. Entire populations moved closer to energy centers. Warmth became a currency. Temperature thresholds were delineated with borders.
Outside the zones, the world died gradually.
The Selar kept track of all changes.
And they learned.
By the mid-3600s, Earth was no longer considered a planet.
It was a network of heated islands floating in a frozen wasteland.
Governments have fractured. Wars were fought over power cores rather than land. Long before they learned about history, children were taught that being cold meant death.
The moon was silent.
Too quiet.
In 3791, the last global climate array failed.
No explanation was provided.
There was no one left to fix it.
By the year 3934, humanity had answered every question it had ever posed—except how to survive what it had created.
The Selar didn't invade.
They did not introduce themselves.
They simply turned the heat off.
And, somewhere in the frozen remnants of Earth, a man named Danial was born into a world on the verge of extinction.