For four and a half billion years, everything that took a piece of me did so without asking.

The first was a planet.

My planet.

It broke before its mountains had finished cooling, scattering its heart across the darkness. I carried iron from its depths and stone from its mantle, bound together in a shape that survived when much larger things did not.

Afterwards came the collisions.

Some carved craters. Others opened fractures. A few left pieces of themselves embedded inside me.

I lost material to violence, to heat, and to the patient abrasion of wandering debris.

But always by accident.

Then the little lights arrived.

At first I mistook them for passing fragments. They moved across my surface, settled beside an ancient fracture, and remained.

More followed.

Metallic structures unfolded against my cliffs. Narrow supports entered my stone. Cold white lights illuminated places where sunlight had not reached for billions of years.

Then something touched my iron.

Not an impact.

A pressure that continued.

The first cutter entered an exposed seam.

Its vibrations travelled through mineral structures older than the red star watching above us.

Stone separated.

Metal emerged.

The small machines caught the fragments and carried them into hollow structures attached to my surface.

They returned to the same place.

Again.

And again.

This was the difference.

Collisions did not return to finish what they had started.

These creatures did.

I watched their machines build pathways across my cliffs. I watched great articulated arms remove material that had belonged to me since the death of my parent world.

I could not understand their urgency.

They lived on timescales shorter than the intervals between some of my impacts.

Yet they worked as though every moment mattered.

One day, a small vessel lifted from the excavation.

Beneath it hung a container filled with my iron.

The vessel departed towards the distant red star.

I could not follow...