The Severing

The Arbor Magnifica stood three thousand years at the center of Dome Seven. Its gnarled limbs stretched toward the artificial sky. The bark twisted like ancient flesh. The roots were deep in the soil, shipped molecule by precious molecule from a dying Earth. The last living testament to what mankind had abandoned.

Reggie Thorne wiped sweat from his brow, glancing nervously at Daniel Weber, who steadied the laser-saw against the massive trunk.

“You sure about this?” Reggie asked, voice tight. “The Magnifica’s sacred to everyone in the colony.”

Daniel snorted, his face illuminated by the whirring red glow of the cutting tool. “Sacred? It’s wood, Reg. Just atoms. And I’ve got buyers who’ll pay enough credits to get us off this miserable rock. Back to Centralis where the real action is.”

The colony had spent fifty years terraforming this hostile planet, building seven protective domes over the only habitable regions. Dome Seven housed the biological preserve—specimens rescued from Earth’s final gasping decades. The Arbor Magnifica was its crown jewel.

“The security drones will be back in seventeen minutes,” Reggie whispered, tapping his neural-watch.

“Then stop talking and help me,” Daniel hissed.

Through the transparent dome ceiling, twin moons cast ghostly light across the preserve. The air recycling systems hummed softly, maintaining the precious atmospheric balance that kept everyone alive.

“We’re going to be famous,” Daniel said, his eyes reflecting the saw’s crimson glow. “They’ll know our names forever.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Reggie muttered.

The laser-saw bit into ancient wood with a sickening hiss. The air filled with the scent of burning cellulose—a smell no one in three generations had experienced. Both men wore reality-filters over their eyes. These devices altered their perception. They made the tree look like just another resource to be harvested. It was rather than the irreplaceable relic it was.

Neither noticed when their filters began to glitch, algorithms unable to maintain the illusion as the grand tree suffered. The reality of what they were doing seeped through the digital barrier.

Above them, nestled in branches that had never known Earth’s sun, a monitoring system awakened. The colony AI—programmed to protect the preserve but constrained by its creators’ limitations—could only watch and record.

“The Preserve Guardians will nail us to the wall,” Reggie said suddenly, clarity breaking through his filter’s manipulation. “We’ll be recycled into base elements.”

“They’ll thank us when they see the credits,” Daniel insisted, but his voice wavered. The laser-saw had cut nearly halfway through.

The tree shuddered.

From the colony hub two kilometers away, alarms began to wail. Emergency lights bathed the dome in pulsing red.

“They know!” Reggie grabbed Daniel’s arm. “We have to go!”

“Almost there!” Daniel yanked free. “Think of the credits!”

The Arbor Magnifica groaned, a sound like no machine could make, like grief given voice. Its ancient wood began to split.

Through their malfunctioning reality-filters, both men suddenly saw what they’d done. Not the sanitized, resource-extraction their filters had shown them, but the true horror—the murder of something ancient, irreplaceable, sacred.

The tree fell with a thunderous crash that shook the dome’s foundations. Three thousand years of life, ended in fifteen minutes of human arrogance.

Security drones swarmed them moments later, pinning them to the ground with gravity fields.

“Daniel Weber, Reginald Thorne,” intoned the mechanical voice of the colony AI. “You have destroyed Arbor Magnifica, the oldest living organism from Earth. The preserve wall has been compromised. Oxygen generation reduced by thirty-three percent.”

“It was his idea!” Reggie screamed, struggling against the invisible force holding him down. “He said we’d be rich!”

“Liar!” Daniel spat back. “You showed me the buyer’s contract!”

Neither man noticed the fissure spreading across Dome Seven’s ceiling as they were dragged away. The fissure started from where the ancient tree had struck it. Neither saw how the crack mirrored exactly the path of destruction they’d created by severing the tree from its roots.

The colony had three hours before catastrophic dome failure.

In the end, it wasn’t fame they achieved, but infamy. Their names became a curse in the human lexicon. “Don’t pull a Weber-Thorne” became shorthand for an act of such monumental stupidity that it threatened everyone’s survival.

On a hostile planet, mankind clung to existence inside fragile bubbles. Two men destroyed something irreplaceable. They did it for the promise of credits they would never live to spend.

The AI watched it all. It recorded for posterity another chapter in humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world. Humanity continued to destroy the natural world, even as it dwindled to precious few specimens under manufactured skies.

The Arbor Magnifica was gone. And something vital died with it—not just oxygen production, but hope that humanity had learned anything at all.