Lightspeed, February 2026
The story opens on the necropolis space station of the ancient Tau Andromeda megacivilization, where specially trained keepers harvested “death echoes” — a mysterious energy released at the moment of dying — and channeled it to power five planets. To these people, death was a willing gift sustaining civilization in peace and plenty. Eventually the civilization declined through wars, schisms, and religious upheaval, and died out entirely, leaving the station silent and abandoned in space.
Millions of years later, three separate civilizations on three different planets are destroyed almost simultaneously: one consumed by a gamma-ray burst, one obliterated by a doomsday weapon, and one devoured by self-replicating nanobacteria. Though impossibly distant from one another, their death echoes ripple outward, overlap, and reverberate through space and time — bleeding subliminally into the final days of three other living worlds.
Those worlds are Earth (AD 2237), the planet Autura, and the gas giant Lalesh. On a flooding, dying Earth, we follow Esther, a jaded security officer on the Singapore Floating Archipelago who has coldly accepted humanity’s impending extinction and recently ended her relationship with the earnest, optimistic Wei Jie. On Autura, a vast collective of insectoid creatures forms temporary individual “Characters” to carry out civilization’s work — among them Unit XJ7832, a single creature existing almost entirely without individual consciousness. On Lalesh, a solitary wind-riding creature of extraordinary intellect called the Lonely Wisp drifts in isolation, creating beautiful art and poems that no one will ever witness.
As the overlapping death echoes wash over these three civilizations, their people begin experiencing alien dreams. Esther dreams she is trapped inside the Collective, initially horrified but gradually awed by the beauty of trillions of beings moving as one. Wei Jie dreams of flying among the Wisps of Lalesh, hearing one tell a magnificent story. Unit XJ7832 briefly inhabits a human body, marveling at solitary individual existence. The Lonely Wisp experiences life as the Collective’s Artist, finding unexpected comfort in the idea that created things can outlast their makers.
These cross-species dream exchanges crack something open in each of them. Esther, long numb and contemptuous of those around her, wakes weeping and shaken into genuine feeling, beginning to question her cold certainty and her dismissal of Wei Jie. Unit XJ7832 briefly wonders whether merging back into the Collective is itself a kind of death. The Lonely Wisp finds solace imagining future Characters who will one day discover their sculptures.
When Earth’s end finally arrives, Esther and Wei Jie slip away from the panicking crowds and face it together on the open ocean platform, the sky glowing red on the horizon. Esther, who believed herself ready for death, finds herself raging against it — discovering at last that her life mattered deeply. The story closes as the death echoes of all three planets sweep through the long-dead Tau Andromeda system, and for one brief, luminous moment, the ancient necropolis station stirs back to life before falling silent again.
Megan Chee is a Singaporean author who has lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, and is currently based in Singapore. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, and other venues. Her work has been translated into Chinese in Science Fiction World, and has been featured in The Year’s Best Fantasy anthology (Pyr Books). Her short story ‘The God of Minor Troubles’ was narrated by Wil Wheaton on Season 1 of his audiobook podcast ‘It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton’. You can find her online at meganchee.carrd.co, @meganflchee on X and Bluesky, and @megancheewrites on Instagram.