Listen to me. Listen to me very carefully. No interference. No interference.

Those words played back again in Small Tree's mind as it hauled the three squirming ape bodies to the shuttle, which had landed in the lake. Samples had been collected from just about everywhere on the planet. Small Tree was quite slow and had been on Earth for three centuries, but the sample cache spoke for itself. It had just about everything it needed to backup the planet's biosphere, which was very convenient, given what was approaching. Small Tree had tools to collect both physical and digital samples of everything, but up until now it hadn't been able to collect any living samples of this one species of ape, which were deemed too important.

The ape astronomers had only just got around to finding the danger being flung towards them. A white dwarf traveling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light was heading directly towards the Sun. The result would be a type 1a supernova. There would be no escape. It had started out as a dim speck of magnitude 15 when it was detected. It had originally been identified as a nova in its own right, but it became clear from closer studies of the new object that it was something completely different. An important fact about ape astronomers is that they can not keep a secret. And so there was plenty of wild speculation about just what this new, incredibly fast, brightening object was. Another important fact about ape astronomers is that it usually takes them some time to finish writing papers about the subjects they study. And so it was on Earth that science was a slow process, one that couldn't react fast enough to the incoming threat to determine just what it was. And it wasn't as though it would make much difference. By the time the star became bright blue, visible across the entire world, it was too late. It spent an hour of visibility getting to the inner solar system, visible as a blue star in the skies across half a world. It turned white and yellow as it passed the earth in an instant and headed towards the Sun. Some 25 minutes later it was over.

To the agency responsible for the supernova-destruction of the Solar System, it was a simple act of self-preservation. They had sent out hundreds such stellar remnants, harnessing truly enormous energies which could have been applied any number of more direct ways. Perhaps they figured the characteristic signature of a 1a supernova would hide their crime. Perhaps it was a signature in its own right. But to this agency, what it was not, was a horrible tragedy.

The apes had written down their thoughts and feelings on paper of what it would be like if an entire planet was destroyed. The most popular stores the apes had seen and heard seemed to use it for shock value--little more than the nuclear-fusion-powered firecrackers they bullied eachother with. Few of them could really, truly contemplate what it would be like for an entire planet to be destroyed.

Nearly five billion years of geological history, three billion years of unique life chemistry and evolution, and countless cultures with their own histories and struggles and passions and stories. Every piece of art ever made from the scribblings on cave walls to the smatterings of pigmented oil in the rough approximation of a 2D projection of ape faces to the noodle-art made by an infant and hung upon a refrigerator door. Every language, every story, every piece of film. The sum total of all scientific knowledge, including that about white dwarf stars and type 1A supernovae. Every organism, every extinct clade preserved in rock. Every forest and hill and unclimbed mountain and every deep sea creature yet to be catalogued. And every ape parent, ape child, ape sibling, ape lover, ape loner, and ape bastard, ape soul. And every memory. To destroy a culture is an unimaginable atrocity. To destroy every culture, to destroy every record of it, is to be nearly the same as deleting it from history. The universe may as well have ended, torn apart atom by atom, quark by quark, for all the difference it'd make. It was all, completely gone.

At least, it would have been, were it not for the unusual practices of the Bird Rock Rail Consortium, Small Tree, and the three lucky apes traveling away from the Sun at speeds much faster than light.