The colonies had reached the edge. He adjusted the microscope and watched the final expansion—transparent circles pressed against glass, nutrients exhausted, growth curve flattening into the familiar sigmoid of every population study since Malthus.

He’d read them all. The warnings. Meadows plotting limits in seventy-two. Catton mapping overshoot in eighty. His own grandfather, soil scientist, documenting topsoil loss in Nebraska fields that his great-grandfather had plowed.

Four generations of data. Same curve.

He labeled the dish: E. coli, Day 7, Population Crash Imminent.

Outside, traffic hummed on the interstate. New subdivisions sprouting where corn had grown. The university’s latest expansion eating farmland at the forest edge.

He thought of Easter Island. The last tree falling while the statues kept rising.

The bacteria couldn’t see the glass walls. Couldn’t model their own trajectory. Couldn’t read the studies their predecessors might have written about resource depletion and exponential growth in bounded systems.

Lucky them.

He capped his pen. Filed the report with ten thousand others documenting the same mathematical inevitability across scales, across species, across time.

Tomorrow he’d start a fresh culture.

The pattern echoed into the void.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​