The existential dread of November 2047, ignited by the chilling announcement of Aetheria’s approach, was abruptly upgraded to a state of global operational panic one month later. The deciphered coordinates from the Citadel of Xylos, that ancient, semi-sentient vessel which now served as a grotesque vanguard, pointed not toward a military stronghold, but toward the dense, glittering heart of human civilization. The date of the coordinates—December 12th, 08:00 Pacific Time—was less than 72 hours away. The warning issued by Elon Musk five years prior, which had been dismissed by many as eccentric doomsday prophecy, now felt like a terrifyingly precise premonition.

Then, at exactly 08:00 PT, the sky above every major city, from New York to Shanghai, became an abyssal theatre. Without warning, without a sonic boom, mᴀssive, disc-shaped vessels of impossible scale decloaked. These were not the fractured, cigar-shaped relic of ‘Oumuamua; these were the Zenith-Class Harbingers, sleek, terrifyingly efficient craft, kilometres wide, their surfaces pulsing with an alien, corrosive green luminescence. They hovered silently, casting vast, emerald shadows over the frightened metropolises below, initiating an immediate, unprecedented Global Lockdown. The air was thick with the silent promise of annihilation, amplified by the sight of the emerald beams of light that pulsed intermittently, probing the skyscrapers like colossal, curious insects. These vessels were the manifest proof that the Xylo-Sapiens, the gaunt, large-brained inhabitants of Aetheria, were no longer just a faint signal from a distant super-Earth—they were here.

Crucially, the ongoing crisis was tied directly back to an astronomical anomaly first detected twenty-two years earlier. A breaking news feed, screaming the header “3I ATLAS: 10TH ANOMALY,” flashed across the few remaining uncensored channels. In 2025, just eight years after the ‘Oumuamua sighting, the SOHO/LASCO C3 solar observatory, initially designed to study solar ejections, had captured a faint, unmistakable image: a blazing, ringed object hurtling from the galactic core, designated 3I ATLAS. Unlike its predecessors, ATLAS appeared to be generating its own chaotic, spiralling energy field, represented by the distorted, glowing structure visible in the archival image. Project Sentinel had been tracking it since its detection, realizing it was another piece in the Aetherian puzzle.

At 08:15 PT, amidst the chaos of the Zenith-Class arrival, a secondary, highly-classified NASA report leaked. It confirmed that they had successfully received and synthesized the first-ever images of the surface of 3I ATLAS. What those images revealed was not the cold, ᴅᴇᴀᴅ rock of a rogue planetoid, but a staggering feat of extraterrestrial engineering: 3I ATLAS was a captured planetoid, hollowed out and entirely converted into Aetheria’s primary mobile orbital shipyard. The surface was a complex lattice of docking bays, energy conduits, and immense, cylindrical launching platforms—the source of the Zenith-Class Harbingers. The report was accompanied by a terrifying addendum: the Xylo-Sapiens were not merely coming; the Zenith-Class deployment was a calculated prelude. The grand strategy of Aetheria, the technologically daunting super-Earth twenty light-years away, was not to conquer, but to harvest the raw genetic and mineral materials of Sol-3, facilitated by their self-propelled, planetoid-sized shipyard. The images from 3I ATLAS, showing the intricate, biomechanical network, proved unequivocally that the Xylo-Sapiens had achieved mastery over both astrophysics and biology, integrating technology and living matter. The “10th Anomaly” was not a cosmic coincidence, but a meticulously planned stage in an interstellar operation that had been underway for millennia, now culminating in the sudden, silent threat hovering over the world’s major cities, its green glow promising a terrifying, non-negotiable future.