Two alien beings sat across from each other in a conference room aboard a space station orbiting Earth. Each one was looking at a tablet that showed detailed data of a vibrant world covered in water.
Both aliens were bipedal, with two arms and two legs. One had a tail and serpentine scales covering his body, the other had a thick coat of fur and two sets of eyes.
Neither spoke for some time. But eventually one of them let out a long hiss that was his species equivalent of a sigh.
“Our proposal was denied.”
The second alien grunted. Putting the tablet down in disgust. But did not speak.
The first alien narrowed his eyes at his friend. “You know we cannot break the laws. Even for this. If we nudge an asteroid to save this planet we open the door for others to start stealing them. The mining coalitions will start a thousand wars by nudging asteroids into their own territories. It will cost trillions of lives.”
The second alien snarled. Cutting off the explanation he knew was coming. He had already known that their leaders would deny their request to save this world. But he had still kindled a spark of hope that things could be different.
An alert on the tablet caused another snarl and the four-eyed alien marched back to his seat.
“More fucking poachers.” He growled as he glared at the screen.
The scaled alien did not have lips capable of frowning, but he shared his friends' love for the creatures of this world, and his hatred of the poachers who had plagued this planet and their research facility for years.
“We can still save some of them. The nature preserve in the Omel system is nearly empty. We could set up the retrieval units to capture as many breeding populations as they are able to and deposit them on the preserve.”
They both checked their tablets. Checking the math of how many species the preserve could support. How many years it would take to get the plan in place. The sheer size of the undertaking was incredible, but it was doable. In theory.
“The asteroid is not calculated to destroy this world for several million years. If we start now we can preserve their species indefinitely. Even if we have to start from such a small starting population.”
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The four-eyed alien clenched his fists.
“But I want a one-way exclusion field set up with the planet's core as its power source. I will be damned if I let any more of these creatures be taken for some noble’s zoo.”
The scaled alien grinned as he placed a hand on his friend's shoulder.
“I agree completely. This will be a worthy cause my friend. Let us get to work.
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Years later the artificial intelligence started the work its masters had created it for. It monitored the planet for species that were starting to go extinct for one reason or another, and when that species reached a calculated point of no return it would trap a portion of the population that was deemed suitable for repopulation in a stasis field, and transport them off planet. Each year it would replicate a few more drones to improve its ability to grab larger populations and observe the environment. When the asteroid finally hit, it did its duty gathering up all of the creatures it could and sending them to safety. But then it noticed an error. Life did not end on this planet when the asteroid struck. It continued. And thus, so did the AI. The error was logged, but the station that once housed its creators had long since been abandoned. And the error was ignored. Eventually, time dictated that the AI's duty would be fulfilled. When a second asteroid hit the planet, the ancient machine sent its final harvest to the preserve along with a full log of its duties and actions. It watched the planet to ensure that its mission was truly complete. And when the last living thing on Earth breathed its last, it finally turned off.
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Urgent Alert! Sentient Creature Detected on Nature Preserve X 500,000,000
Five hundred million urgent alerts greeted the Olma System Research and Observation Team Manager, Kryxess, as she awoke from an all too short sleep cycle. She blinked at the screen, her beak going numb as she started to read the alerts. This was not the first time sentient creatures had broken into the Olma Preserve exclusion field that had been created by the original terraformars and creators of the preserve. Each time the would-be poachers arrived on the planet in an attempt to steal samples of the local wildlife, they had been swatted out of orbit by the defense system when their half-baked countermeasures inevitably failed. The exclusion field had been studied by Kyxess’s people for half of their recorded history, and they had never come anywhere close to uncovering its secrets.
These attempts would happen once every hundred years or so, or every time a new advancement in wormhole technology was discovered and someone inevitably would attempt to bypass the planet's defenses. But these poaching parties would usually contain somewhere between ten to one hundred sentient creatures and a single ship. For the close to 400 Million years of data the original research station had access to, there had never been more than three hundred sentient creatures on the surface at one time. To suddenly have two mid-sized planets worth of population appear on the planet overnight was either an error, or a disaster in the making. And for the first time in her life, Kryxess was not thrilled to be in charge. She closed her eyes, fell back on her training, and called her boss.