Ceres bloomed.

A world that had once been an almost barren rock was now lush with vibrant alien flora and fauna. Verdant forests, green-veined and threaded by rivers of clear aquamarine. Blossoms shimmered like cut opals. A beautiful sight wherever you looked.

The terraforming had been a success. More than that. It was miraculous.

From the panoramic window of her lab, Dr. Esa Porter, the colony’s exobiologist and terraforming specialist, watched the twin suns casting long shadows over the valley.

Her valley. Her garden.

She was the one sculpting this world, breathing life into it with the help of a microscopic army of self-replicating nanites. Her diagnostics confirmed it: growth rates were soaring sixty percent beyond even the most optimistic projections.

Esa was filled with pride and the fierce, possessive love of a creator for their creation. This wasn’t just another colony. It was a testament. A monument to human ingenuity.

“Still admiring your handiwork?”

Lena, the colony’s geologist, leaned against the door frame, a mug of steaming coffee in hand. Her smile was as warm as the geothermal vents she loved to study.

“Well, someone has to admire perfection,” Esa shot back with a grin.

“While you were busy with your rocks, my babies are building a paradise.”

“The bones have to be strong for the flesh to grow, my love. I’m just making sure your babies have a solid foundation to build on.”

Lena took a sip before continuing.

“Speaking of which, the deep-earth resonance is oddly musical today. Almost soothing.”

Still captivated by her screen, Esa waved a hand dismissively.

“Just some seismic activity. The planet is still settling.”

She was eager to catalog her latest prize: a new fungus specimen collected on her morning excursion. A beautiful growth with gills as fragile as a moth’s wings.

It was Esa’s job to classify and make sense of every new miracle found in her garden. She relished these moments, escaping the lab to get her hands dirty in the very soil she had willed into existence.

Back in her lab, Esa slid the fresh samples under the molecular imager, expecting the familiar dance of proteins and cellular division.

Instead, the imager confronted her with something odd… Not odd. Rather impossible.

The specimen’s innermost structures were not a chaotic organic tangle. They formed an organic lattice-shaped by non-Euclidean geometry. A perfection so precise it had no business existing in biology. Like a signature of a language life wasn’t meant to know. Almost a mockery of the golden spiral’s comfort.

Esa’s heart raced at the anomaly’s alien beauty. But it felt just… wrong.

Lacking a rational explanation, she logged it as anomalous pattern growth, blaming it on a quirk of exotic radiation or some localized phenomenon.

Nevertheless, the image seared into her mind. A beautiful yet impossible flaw in her perfect garden.

Esa couldn’t stop seeing it. Everywhere.

The branching veins of leaves.
Beneath the coiling roots of the moss.
Even etched in the iridescent scales of river fish.

She printed scan after scan, pages littering her lab like fallen leaves. Each one was proof that her garden wasn’t just growing. It was remembering something. A single, sprawling tapestry, all woven from the same impossible thread.

She burst into Lena’s geology lab, spreading her printouts across the main console.

“Look,” she rasped. Her voice cracked from sleepless nights.

“It’s in everything that grows. The trees. The moss. Even the fish…”

Lena’s ever-present smile, the one Esa fell for the moment they both were assigned to this world, vanished instantly.

“That’s… not possible,” Lena whispered. She turned to her console, pulling up the latest deep-core scans. A stratum of quartz flickered into view.

“This layer is at a depth of over three kilometers. It’s older than the terraform. Older than us. It’s ancient.”

Esa immediately understood where Lena’s smile had gone.

There it was. The same pattern, clear as day, embedded in the planet’s oldest bones.

A terrifying thought formed in Esa’s mind.

“The flora and fauna aren’t just growing on their own,” she breathed. “Lena… it’s mimicking the planet. Or the planet is… guiding it?”

Neither had any answer. Esa found none in her nightmares either. Only more variations of the same endless pattern.

In the days that followed, the wrongness of it all crept closer.

First, Peter the cook. Once quiet, now silent. Except for a low, droning hum with a melody no one recognized. At meals, others hummed along without knowing why.

Next, colonists lingered outside longer. Eyes open, faces tilted to the sun. Dead stares. Soft smiles.

Then came the dreams.

“I was a stone in an open field,” one of the engineers murmured to a circle of zoned-out listeners. “I felt the rain and wind for a thousand years on me. It was so peaceful.”

Esa ran diagnostics on herself through her neural implants. Nothing. No corruption. No anomalies.

She seemed unaffected by whatever was taking hold of the others.

When she tried to warn others of the changes, they just blinked at her, placid and empty.

“We’re just settling in, Esa,” they’d say.

“Acclimatizing.”

One afternoon, she caught Lena scratching absently at her forearm. She leaned in closer to grab Lena’s wrist and pushed up the sleeve. Esa’s chest tightened, her heart hammering.

A delicate greenish patch curled along the skin. Not a rash, but more like a filigree of moss, spreading unmistakably in the hauntingly familiar pattern.

A strangled gasp escaped her. She dropped Lena’s arm as if it burned her and stumbled backward.

“You’re fighting so hard, Esa,” Lena said softly, her voice flat, almost not hers.

“Why don’t you just let go?”

In a blind rush, Esa fled to her lab: her sanctuary, the only place that might still obey her rules. She had to know what was happening before it was too late. One last test, even though she already knew the answer.

While dissecting another sample, her scalpel slipped. Blood welled from her thumb. The perfect red bead mesmerized her. Then, with dread and a scientist’s final instinct, she smeared it on a clean slide and fed it to the imager, despite her fear of what she might see.

The imager focused, rendering her blood cells in plasma. But there was something else. A restless haze of silver motes.

Nanites.

They should have been inert by now, half-dissolved, a relic of a job well done.

But they moved. No, they swarmed.

She watched, numb, as they clung to cell walls, dismantling and weaving them into miniature latticework. The same terrifyingly beautiful pattern that lived in the trees and moss and Lena’s skin.

They weren’t building life anymore. They were rewriting it. Inside her.

Esa’s knees buckled against the lab bench.

A sharp sound startled her. Peter’s droning hum, now a choir, drifted through the vents like a lullaby.

Her eyes darted to the window. Outside, colonists stood motionless in the dusk, faces tilted skyward, pollen drifting around them like gold dust in a cathedral.

Sheer panic set in, pure and primal. ‘Esa the scientist’ was gone. Only a raw survival instinct remained.

No more time for caution or careful science. She had to warn them.

The orbital dock.
The supply ships.
Earth.
Everyone.
Anyone.

She ran, single-minded: the colony’s long-range comms tower, less than two klicks from the lab domes.

She stumbled out the door into the dusk.

The world she burst into was no longer her masterpiece. It clawed at her at every step.

Golden pollen thickened the air, clogging her lungs and clouding her mind. Each breath washed her in unnatural serenity. The pollen was sweet, tasting of home and old memories. A tempting whisper promising an end to fear, an end to all struggle.

Rest, it seemed to say.

Join. Be one.

She stumbled forward with ragged breath and trembling hands, trying to resist the pull. Her footprints in the moss filled in behind her, shoots rising in moments. Branches brushed her sleeves, tugging like gentle hands.

Through the haze, the dark silhouette of the comms tower beckoned. A slender promise, maybe salvation. She forced her legs to move.

Her path took her past the geology outpost, where a figure stood unnaturally still beside the seismic array.

It was Lena.
Or what she had become.

Esa’s breath caught in her throat, strangled by horror. Lena’s body was rooted in soft earth, her legs vanished into a trunk of fused muscle and bark. Her beautiful red hair was replaced by delicate fronds that shivered in the breeze. Eyes unblinking, green as spring.

“My love,” she rasped, her voice a mere rustle of leaves. She reached for Esa with a branch where an arm had been.

“The soil is rich. We all are growing so well. Join us. Let us be one”

Esa staggered sideways, bile rising. She tried to scream, but the planet’s ever-louder whispers drowned it out.

She could feel the changes inside her now.

No. Not yet. Move.

Her joints stiffened. The lines of her palms and fingerprints curled into fractal spirals. Her thoughts started to fracture, too. Her own panicked monologue intertwined with the planet’s vast, slow hum.

Have to… warn them…
Such a warm sun… the roots sink deep…
NO! The tower!

Finally, Esa reached her goal: the comms tower.

After bursting through the door, she immediately collapsed against the console. The room spun, her vision a haze. She had come too far just to give up.

Her fingers, numb and clumsy, scraped across the console’s worn keys. The emergency beacon howled awake. Its piercing shriek was a welcome intrusion into the planet’s tranquil hum.

She forced her fingers to obey, each keystroke a battle:

WARNING. COLONY LOST. PLANET CERES IS…

She hesitated. What could she say? What words could possibly contain the unfolding horrors?

Hostile?

No, it didn’t act out of hatred or fear. It was just biology. It simply was.

She looked at her hands. A delicate green shoot unfurled from her little finger.

It wasn’t killing her.
It was planting her.

…NOT HOSTILE. FERTILE.

She slammed the transmit key. The signal bled into the void, a human spark against a god roused from ancient slumber. She had done all she could.

The beacon’s red eye pulsed behind her. Esa stumbled through the open hatch and sank to her knees into the soft, waiting earth. The fear, the struggle, the very concept of Esa drained away like water into sand.

No pain. Only warmth and weightlessness.

She felt the shape of her veins curling in new directions. A gentle, welcoming dissolution of her consciousness. Its tiny, frantic spark faded into the calm, ancient awareness of the world. Her identity became a single note in a planetary symphony.

She was home.

Where a woman named Esa had fallen, a new and singularly beautiful flower grew, one never seen before. It unfurled its petals, revealing the hauntingly beautiful pattern towards the universe.