[SF] The Quiet Colony
A New World
The sky over Eris V shimmered with a deep violet hue as two suns dipped below the jagged horizon. The settlers of this distant world walked hurriedly along narrow streets lined with domed dwellings. No one lingered to chat; no one dared to make eye contact for too long. To survive on Eris V was not simply to avoid physical threats, but to evade the invisible terror that defined their lives: disappearance by choice.
This was the quiet colony’s unspoken rule: everyone had the right to vanish ten others from existence, no questions asked. A faint whisper of anger, an unintended slight, or even an innocuous act that provoked irritation could be enough to tip someone’s balance. The eradication was absolute; no body remained, no trace lingered. Just absence.
When humanity first arrived on Eris V, the discovery of this mysterious ability had seemed almost divine, a way to ensure order and peace in their fledgling society. But in practice, it had turned the settlement into a suffocating theater of silent performances. Every smile was forced, every word weighed like gold.
Jessa Prynne, a young hydroponic technician, shuffled into her assigned work pod with her gaze firmly on the floor. She offered a shallow nod to her colleague Marik, who was meticulously pruning tomato vines. Jessa didn’t like Marik much, he was gruff, impatient, and dismissive of her ideas, but she made sure her face betrayed nothing but neutrality. Anything more might be misinterpreted.
“Morning,” Marik grunted without looking up.
“Morning,” Jessa replied, matching his tone precisely. She turned to her station and pretended not to notice the tension in his hunched shoulders. Something was bothering him today; she could feel it. She made a mental note to avoid unnecessary conversation. The day stretched on in uneasy silence, broken only by the occasional hiss of nutrient misters. Jessa worked methodically, careful not to disturb Marik’s routines.
At lunchtime, she stepped outside to eat in the shadow of the colony’s central dome. A small crowd had gathered in the square, murmuring in hushed tones. Jessa approached cautiously, staying on the periphery. At the center of the commotion was a single empty stool, a lunch tray abandoned beside it.
“Who?” she whispered to the woman next to her.
“Clara,” the woman replied without looking at her. Clara had been one of the market’s produce sellers, known for her loud laugh and penchant for haggling. Someone had found her irritating enough to make her disappear.
Jessa’s stomach churned. Clara was the sixth person she knew to vanish that month. The disappearances were relentless, a grim reminder that no one, not the kind, not the clever, not the careful, was truly safe.
She hurried back to the hydroponic dome, her appetite forgotten.
By evening, Jessa sat in her small dwelling, reviewing the colony’s social guidelines on her tablet. The document was a relic from the settlement’s early days, a futile attempt to codify the unwritten rules. “Speak softly. Avoid confrontation. Respect personal space. Maintain an agreeable demeanor.” The words blurred together, meaningless now.
Her thoughts turned to her own list. Nine of her ten slots remained unused. She had chosen to disappear someone once, a man who had harassed her during her first year on Eris V. She hadn’t regretted it, but the memory still haunted her. It wasn’t guilt, exactly. It was the knowledge that she, too, could wield this terrible power. That everyone could. Outside her window, the colony’s streets were dark and silent. A lone figure hurried past, glancing nervously over their shoulder. Jessa wondered if they had disappeared someone today, or if they feared they might be next.
The following morning, Marik didn’t show up to the hydroponic dome. His absence hung in the air like a storm cloud. Jessa worked quietly, trying not to think about whether someone had finally tired of his gruff demeanor.
By midday, she spoke with two engineers who entered her hydroponic lab.
“Marik’s gone.”
“Disappeared?”
"Yeah. Heard it was one of his neighbors. Something about his dog barking too much at night.”
Jessa’s hands trembled as she returned to her workstation and adjusted the pH of the nutrient solution. A barking dog. That was all it had taken.
By the end of the week, the colony’s administrators announced a new initiative to foster “community harmony.” They encouraged citizens to file complaints with mediators rather than resort to disappearance. Jessa doubted it would work. The power to erase someone so completely was too intoxicating, too final.
As she walked home that night, Jessa wondered if humanity had made a mistake by coming to Eris V. The planet’s air was breathable, its soil fertile, its resources abundant, but it had stripped them of something far more vital: the freedom to live without fear. Here, the only path to survival was absolute conformity. And yet, Jessa realized, the greatest danger wasn’t the disappearances themselves. It was the silence they left behind.
The Splintered Colony
Twenty years had passed since humanity’s hopeful settlement on Eris V. The purple skies and dual suns still graced the horizon, but the once-unified colony had disintegrated into chaos. What began as a utopian experiment was now a fractured, war-torn landscape of feuding factions, each fighting for survival and dominance.
The Decline of Unity
By the second decade, the colony’s population had halved. Entire families had been obliterated by the epidemic of disappearances, leaving orphaned children to fend for themselves. Skilled professionals, engineers, scientists, doctors, were vanishing faster than they could be replaced. Infrastructure deteriorated, medical care dwindled, and innovation all but ceased. Fear of standing out or speaking up had paralyzed ambition, leaving the settlement unable to solve its most basic problems.
Factions emerged in this void, stratifying society into rigid ideological groups. The once-shared goal of thriving on Eris V was replaced by bitter tribalism. Extremist coalitions weaponized the right to disappear others, combining quotas to erase political and ideological opponents en masse. Whole neighborhoods were emptied overnight, their homes left as silent tombs.
The Rise of Feudal City-States
Amid this collapse, small groups of settlers began to isolate themselves, forming feudal city-states with rigidly enforced common worldviews. These enclaves fortified their borders, built agricultural units, and formed rudimentary security forces. Each group viewed outsiders with suspicion, fearing infiltration by extremists who might exploit their disappearance quotas.
The Technocrats of Aletheia prided themselves on preserving knowledge and science, but their strict meritocracy made them intolerant of anyone who couldn’t contribute to their intellectual goals. The Faithful of Solara believed that disappearances were divine judgment and saw themselves as agents of spiritual purity. The Free Commune of Lysia rejected all authority, embracing anarchy, but they, too, enforced their beliefs with a violent fervor.
Trade between factions was sporadic and fraught with danger. Most interactions ended in disappearances, accusations of sabotage, or outright skirmishes.
The air above Lysia’s outer farms hummed with the sound of surveillance drones.
Tomas Rheel pulled his hood lower as he guided a small cargo cart along the cracked roadway between settlements. The cart carried nutrient paste and salvaged machine parts, goods valuable enough to risk the journey. Beside him walked his daughter, Lena, no older than twelve, clutching a worn satchel against her chest.
“Keep your eyes down,” Tomas whispered.
Three black drones drifted overhead in perfect silence except for the faint electric whine of their rotors. Their sensor clusters glowed pale blue as they scanned the travelers below. One paused directly above Lena.
She froze.
The drone projected a sharp cone of light across her face.
“Citizen identification requested,” an artificial voice announced.
Tomas slowly raised his transit papers with trembling hands. “Independent traders,” he said carefully. “Authorized passage to Solara.”
The drone lingered several agonizing seconds before moving on.
Lena exhaled shakily. “What happens if they don’t like you?”
Tomas stared at the retreating machines. “Then someone decides you shouldn’t exist anymore.”
Neither spoke for the remainder of the journey.
The Extremists’ Hunt
The extremists on both ends of the ideological spectrum, the Coalition for Purity and the Vanguard of Liberation, saw the division of society as an intolerable outcome. For them, a fractured Eris V was a threat to their dream of absolute ideological control. They began hunting down the feudal groups, using drones, spies, and coordinated disappearances to wipe out dissidents.
At the northern approach to Aletheia, armed sentries had converted an old agricultural tunnel into a checkpoint fortress.
Concrete barriers narrowed travelers into single-file lines beneath floodlights and scanning arrays. Above the checkpoint entrance hung the Coalition’s slogan in enormous white letters:
DIFFERENCE IS DISEASE.
Travelers stood in silence as masked officials reviewed identity records and ideological compliance scores. A woman several places ahead of the line began sobbing quietly when guards discovered unauthorized religious texts in her satchel.
“No extremist intent,” she pleaded. “They belonged to my father.”
One of the guards touched the side of his helmet, listening to a transmission. Then he calmly pointed toward a side corridor.
“Secondary review.”
Everyone in line knew what that meant.
The woman looked desperately at the surrounding crowd, but every face turned away. No one dared show sympathy. Sympathy itself could be interpreted as ideological contamination.
Minutes later, the corridor door opened again.
It was empty.
The line moved forward without a word.
The Coalition preached that difference itself was a disease. The Vanguard answered with its own doctrine of unity through elimination. Though their rhetoric differed, both movements increasingly resembled one another in practice. Each justified disappearances, surveillance, and ideological purges as necessary sacrifices for the colony’s survival. In their pursuit of absolute order, both factions accelerated Eris V’s collapse.
The Wars Begin
As resources grew scarce, the feudal city-states turned on one another. Aletheia coveted the fertile lands controlled by the Faithful of Solara. Lysia raided neighboring enclaves for supplies, justifying their theft as liberation from oppression. The Faithful retaliated by disappearing entire communities, claiming divine sanction for their actions.
Disappearances were no longer personal acts of vengeance but calculated strategies of war. City-states began pooling their quotas, erasing rival leaders, scientists, and military strategists to cripple enemy factions. When disappearance quotas proved insufficient, they turned to conventional weapons. Crude rockets and chemical agents scarred the landscape, leaving vast tracts of Eris V uninhabitable.
The Fall of the Colony
By the 30th year of settlement, the colony’s ideals were utterly destroyed. The dream of a unified, harmonious society on Eris V was now a cautionary tale of humanity’s inability to rise above its primal instincts.
The central dome, once the heart of the settlement, lay in ruins. The hydroponic farms were overgrown and untended, their irrigation systems long since failed. The streets that had bustled with cautious but hopeful settlers were now littered with debris, the silence broken only by the occasional drone of an extremist patrol.
In the end, the factions fought not for survival, but out of sheer hatred and fear. No one remembered why they had come to Eris V. The planet’s promise of a new beginning had been consumed by humanity’s oldest flaws: greed, fear, and the insatiable need for control.
A Faint Hope
Amid the chaos, a small band of survivors sought refuge in the wild lands beyond the city-states. They were not bound by ideology but by the shared desire to escape the cycle of destruction. These survivors abandoned the disappearance quotas altogether, refusing to use them even in self-defense. They spoke in whispers of starting anew, not as conquerors, but as caretakers.
Among the survivors was a young woman named Lyra Prynne, a distant descendant of Jessa, the hydroponic technician who had once tended the colony’s first gardens beneath the central dome.
Lyra carried one of the few surviving journals from the settlement’s earliest years. Inside were careful notes on irrigation systems, crop rotations, and observations about human behavior during the colony’s decline.
One passage had been underlined so many times the page had nearly torn:
*Fear eventually destroys the people who believe it protects them.*
At night, the survivors gathered around small fires while Lyra quietly read from the journal. For many of the younger settlers, Jessa’s words were the only remaining memory of the colony before the wars, before the disappearances became weapons, before silence became law.
Yet, even this fragile hope was shadowed by the past. The wild lands were dangerous, and the extremists hunted relentlessly. The survivors knew that peace was precarious, and the scars of Eris V ran deep.
As they gazed beneath the violet skies of Eris V, the survivors wondered whether if humanity could ever truly begin again, or if their destiny was to destroy every world they touched.