Lagos

Lagos is a supposedly-human colony world located in Rana system, within the Hubble sector. Official census records from the 26th century list the planet as having between 500,000 and 2.25 million citizens, though such reports are inconsistent. The planet was apparently invaded and glassed in 2241 and the Rana system declared off-limits entirely, though subsequent voyages to the system have found little evidence of any planets capable of supporting human life - the closest being a Class-VI greenhouse planet located within the closer end of the system's goldilocks zone. Within the post-war era, Lagos has become the subject of popular conspiracy theory, with such wild conspiracies ranging from the Covenant having tested a "planet-killer" weapon in the system and completely obliterating the world, to the planet having been ejected from the orbit of its parent star due to orbital mechanics, or even that the Class-VI greenhouse world in the system is Lagos, and that the planet underwent a catastrophic atmospheric collapse fairly recently in its history (some speculation blames the Covenant for this shift, while others blames errant terraforming disasters) and the surviving population moved into underground bunkers.

The mystery surrounding the planet is more commonly attributed to the effects of the war-era Operation: WORM BOX, suggesting the world is one of hundreds of "fake colonies" planted by Office of Naval Intelligence AI during the war and retroactively-planted in logistics data from across previous decades. Nearly fifty years' worth of trade logs, ship registries and cargo manifests can be attributed to the planet, though many of these references are contradictory and coincidentally, many of the named ships and individuals are now listed as KIA during the war. While the years following the cessation of hostilities saw the Office of Naval Intelligence deploy AI scrubbers to attempt to remove all references to data planted by WORM BOX, these efforts were only marginally successful and many false records were able to slip through the cracks; Lagos is simply one of the higher-profile cases.

Despite the apparent evidence to the contrary, a small community of "Lagospi" have sprung up in the public Waypoint forums, claiming to be refugees hailing from this planet. However, commonly-accepted fact tells that these individuals are likely simply trolls posting false data or rogue WORM BOX algorithms still running with a data connection to the wider public databases of humanity, continuing to claim their visitation of a colony world which likely never existed - sometimes dubbed the "Ghosts of Lagos" in online lexicon.

In lieu of Lagos proper, a small community mostly made up of die-hard conspiracy theorists have taken up residence in the Rana system's asteroid belt, claiming to look for signs of the "missing colony" in an attempt to "preserve the memory of the two million dead", against the wishes of an "ONI cover-up". As of 2555, the funding campaigns to conduct surveys of the system's greenhouse world to look for signs of artificial construction had been shared online, to minimal success.