MIGRATORS

Migrator hyper-decelerated and reversed down its flight path, its massive black body punching back through the Oberon Gate.  Lights flickered off and on along its miles-long body, the cryo-sleeping bodies undisturbed in their tanks in the hold. Vast databanks the size of nuclear reactors holding only a tithe of the selected knowledge of the species whirred in reverse as the analyst programs retreated back towards the root data. Migrator was returning to Martius, now at a fifth of its max speed and yet faster than any machine had ever travelled.
Nuclear fire blazed along the surface of the red planet, and a mushroom cloud collapsed inwards as Migrator approached tail-first. The blinding heat of the warhead imploded and disappeared, and Martius, the jewel of Mars, lay revealed in its war-scarred beauty. Migrator docked in the massive underground silo at Kim Station, and a flurry of frantic engineers and scientists and astronauts raced around its cooling engines as its systems steadily went offline and its cargo travelled back out from its hundred ramps and exit bays. Crying families waving goodbye became dry-eyed and retreated out of the silo and outside the thumps and whines of warheads lessened in intensity and eventually vanished. Migrator began to be taken apart, the decades-long process of its construction reversing in real time.
The silo hadn't been built yet. The dream of constructing Migrator just occurred to Shammur Horikawa. The war between the Planetary Confederacy and the New Dawn Fleet still undeclared. Zeta-9 gas,  AKA Screamer Fume, hits the rogue state of Europa. Jacqueline Fonda, President of the Planetary Confederacy orders the construction of Oberon Gate, a hyperspace portal to explore neighbouring star systems. First interplanetary war as Neptune and Saturn secede from the Confederacy.
Martius is founded. Commercial space flight pioneered by Voyager Family Tours. John F Kennedy declares that the United States would be at the moon before the Soviet Union. James Watt watches his kettle boil over. Quetzalcoatl returns to the Empire of the Sun with horse, cannon, steel and smallpox. A man is nailed to a cross outside Jerusalem. The Great Wall is built to protect the Middle Kingdom. The pyramids gleam beneath the sun. The last mammoth dies.
The blood disappears from the naked ape's fingers as he grows hair and stoops down on all fours, retreating back to the forest, to his nuts and berries. He grows smaller and smaller, increasingly rodent-like, hiding in the underbrush as giant lizard feet shake the ground. The reptile grows larger, and then smaller again, ever smaller. He grows a sail upon his back and stares out across the forest that is now a swamp, towards the ocean. He walks towards the water, on webbed feet that slowly become fins, and his sail becomes a fin, and now he is a fish walking on the shoreline. He slips into the sea. He is going home.
The fish becomes bigger, and bigger, and bigger, an armoured predator in the primordial oceans fighting to survive against beasts far more monstrous than he ever was or would be. He grows smaller again, ever smaller. He disappears from the view of the naked eye, and the world turns black. The oceans steam and hiss.
Cells collapse into one another. Amino acids sizzle and vanish. Ancient oceans swirl lifelessly until they dry up and recede back into the crackling skies swirling with hot potentiality. Thunder roars over the Earth's dead surface.
The first rains are coming.