Something drove the sanitation protocols into overdrive and led to the eradication of every last lifeform within sector thirty eight. Whole families were reduced to sterile dust overnight and packed away into neatly labelled vacuum-sealed packages which sat where the living once were.
If it moved - it was declared a contagion and treated as such. We couldn't get anywhere near the entry points without triggering the parameter droids who were set at the highest alert level possible for a domestic sector and programmed to take all invasive contagions to be disposed of.
That meant us.
We weren't entirely without a plan, our forebears had left a dozen or so manuals in the main body of the generation ship that brought us to the new planet several hundred years ago. They mentioned a reset pattern that could be initiated remotely, a pattern to bring everything back to day one.
On the one hand it would fix the AI error in sector thirty eight and stop it from spreading to the surrounding sectors - it would save our lives. On the other hand it would erase every last little piece of data we'd accumulated over the centuries and all our history on our new home would be gone forever.
It took us far longer to act than it should have and by the time the reset sequence had been put into motion a further five sectors were sanitised and seven more were beginning the lethal process. We lost more than we'll ever be able to get back but we shouldn't lose any more.
Not unless someone tries to restore the previous versions in order to access our historical logs and copy all of that precious information over. It could potentially re-trigger the error in the sanitisation protocol and lead to a second massacre which no amount of information is worth.
But if I'm careful enough...
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