The year is 2047. Two decades after the bizarre, cigar-shaped interstellar object ‘Oumuamua first streaked across the astronomical radar in 2017, humanity’s initial curiosity has curdled into cold, existential dread. Back in 2042, the visionary and often-prophetic technologist, Elon Musk, had delivered his now-infamous global address, a frantic warning punctuated by the stark, terrifying simplicity of its headline: “WE WILL DIE!” His fear was not of climate change or terrestrial warfare, but of the silence—the unnerving cosmic silence that he knew belied an intelligence far older and exponentially more powerful than our own.

Musk’s initial suspicion was centered on the non-gravitational acceleration of ‘Oumuamua; an unexplained thrust that defied natural cometary outgᴀssing. Now, the truth, meticulously pieced together by the covert Project Sentinel—a multinational effort led by former SpaceX engineers—has confirmed his gravest fears and linked the object to a hidden world. ‘Oumuamua, they discovered, was not a mere rock but the Citadel of Xylos, an ancient, semi-sentient generational vessel, a planetary fragment hollowed out and repurposed centuries ago. Its surface, scorched and irregular, housed five kilometer-long, softly glowing engines—the very sources of the mysterious acceleration.

The Citadel had been dormant, a mᴀssive piece of debris masquerading as a natural phenomenon, until a faint, deliberate pulse was detected originating from a distant, extrasolar gas giant’s Trojan point. That pulse, finally deciphered in 2047, was a beacon from the Citadel’s home world, a planet of impossible beauty and daunting technology: Aetheria. The discovery of Aetheria, confirmed to be a mᴀssive, terra-engineered super-Earth existing in a binary star system nearly 20 light-years away, irrevocably shattered the Fermi Paradox.

Aetheria’s inhabitants, the Xylo-Sapiens—whose gaunt, large-brained visage now plastered across every deep-web broadcast serves as a chilling counterpoint to human familiarity—had not vanished; they were merely far away. And, as the Citadel’s main thrusters began to glow with a malevolent, purposeful light, the final, chilling message from Aetheria itself was received, broadcast across all frequencies, overriding every terrestrial system: “WE ARE COMING…” The existence of a planet outside Earth was no longer a philosophical debate; it was an impending, cataclysmic reality, and the fragments of the Citadel of Xylos were merely the harbingers of its unstoppable approach.