Fiction: The Reunion, a short story

The Reunion 📡

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2026-05-22

In pitch perfect silence the vessel cut through the vast darkness.

It left no ripples behind. The stars made almost no reflections upon the hull and the eyes that once had seen its creation had since long been closed forever.

Had it not been for the marking on one of the wings, then the name would also have been forgotten.

It was a generational spaceship, assumed to be the last of its kind. Where the crew was born, where they lived and where they died.

Every person onboard had their allotted number of resources. There was an equilibrium of sorts were nothing went to waste and everything was recycled somehow.

The food was distributed through a simple algorithm, invented before anyone currently living in the ship had been born. They sometimes referred to that era as the old days.

In the evenings the older generations would tell the young ones stories of the old days, as their predecessors in turn had told them the stories throughout the millennia.

One of the most popular stories spoke of a red planet. With dense forests in which the flora reached high, gatherings of clear water, tall mountains and large deserts with caves.

The young ones would look at the person telling this origin story as if they were enthralled. They had heard it a hundred times by now, knew it by heart even, and who knows how many times the story had been repeated.

Everyone knew the end of the story, for it was also the beginning. It carried a grave message. The destruction of the planet, weapons that generated the energy of a small star, the lingering radiation and the end of all that was good. Trees being atomized, lakes turned to steam and later into pure plasma and volcanic stones covering the surface. The once colorful dot in space was now a quiet graveyard with few traces of civilisation, as desolate as its celestial neighbors.

This extinction event did not put a full stop to civilisation, but it marked a new beginning for the select few that boarded the last of two ships that had managed to escape the planet. The first ship boarded was destined for a nearby planet, but for a long time it was believed to have been lost when communication ceased. The second ship took their chances in other regions of space, in search for a habitable planet.

Months without communication passed at first, then the years and eventually generations. A few attempts had been made to send out scouts. Vehicles harnessing the power of light made desperate patrols as long as the fuel lasted, but they always returned unsuccessful, if they returned at all.

Countless generations had passed when strange signals first reached the remaining generational ship. Electromagnetic waves, both long and short, barely noticeable at first. Rhythmic and to some degree resembling a pattern.

A few generations later a strange object had been caught by the advanced sensors. What looked like an unmanned spaceship was traveling through space and a golden disk that it carried was brought aboard after the vehicle was slowed down using a spacetime reverser. The crew aboard the ship knew they had found the traces of the descendants of the lost twin ship.

It was only some time later that the dark ship carved an elliptic path towards the blue, green and white planet. The resources would finally let them be free from their casket. They had also learned to decode the electromagnetic signals over the years. A simple, almost barbaric, method of communication but it was clear that they communicated with the ship now.

After simple decoding, enhancement and translation, the message simply read "Welcome to Earth".