Aliens.
A thought one would always find fascinating.
And terrifying at the same time.
Many fear the unknown, and that is perfectly understandable.
What we don’t know could hurt or kill us.
It’s often a natural defense mechanism.
Fear the unknown, avoid death.
But what of those curious souls who ignore their fear?
Those who actively seek the truth?
Those who want to know,
“Are we alone?”
Well, to start this story off properly, we’d have to do some history homework.
A look at Man’s rise, and His thirst for knowledge.
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It was the middle of the Twenty-First Century when Man first discovered the concept of faster-than-light space travel. A woman, known simply as Kojikia, discovered what would become known as the Kojikia Principle. Her discovery led to the building of the first FTL-capable spaceship engines, expanding Man’s explorable range a hundredfold. Leading Him out of his own solar system, and to the foreign stars lightyears away.
However, at the time, the engines were not as clean-cut, nor as efficient as they are now, so of course there would be the problems of destination calculation and time-of-arrival. Sometimes ships would jump only to end up hundreds of lightyears from their intended destination. Sometimes the engines would fail to fire, requiring a full recharge in order to have the ship jump once more. The recharges would take hours on small ships, and days on the largest vessels.
All time that was lost due to the instability of the Kojikia Engines.
With ships having their engines fail, pirates who commanded sub-light cruisers would swarm the stranded vessels and plunder to their hearts’ content. These plundering would lead to massive amounts of deaths for both civilian and military personnel.
Eventually, the raids got so bad that the colonies of Man began to argue and bicker as to how to settle these raids and try the pirates taking part in them. Some colonies believed in adding more defense measures to their ships, as pirates never truly go away. Others believed that the only way to stop the raids was to hunt down and kill every last pirate,
This led to instability amongst the Human colonies, with some worlds declaring independence and fighting each other over their different solutions to the “Pirate Question”.
Then it all came crumbling down in the late Twenty-Third Century, beginning what would become known as the Era of Betrayal.
Several colonies declared independence from the Earth-based government. This would, normally, not be a problem as the government would allow colonies to have independence provided they can pay to have their planet removed from the Chart. However, these colonies not only left, but began to attack the Earth-government’s remaining colonies and vessels. They declared a state of war between the rebellious colonies and the Earth-controlled colonies.
The fighting was grueling, long, and brutal. The war being fought over several decades, each one claiming more lives than the last. Billions of men and women left their homeworlds to never return, being killed on some far-off planet with no corpse being returned to the family.
At the war’s end, however, the Earth-loyal side proved victorious. Their superior weapons and technology allowed them to defeat the rebellious worlds; conquering them and returning them the rule of Earth.
The loyalist worlds met, and began to discuss as to what to do to insure another Era of Betrayal never occurred. Again, the colonies began to argue amongst themselves. Deciding what to do to prevent another war was almost as hard as fighting the war itself. Opinions were thrown about, document drafts made, speeches given. The process looked to be going nowhere.
That was, until a man named Ethaniel Greene presented the concept of the Technocratic Earth Coalition of Trade.
In a matter of months, every politician ratified the creation of the Coalition.
And so, the Coalition was formed, and began to send out fleets to incorporate ALL Human worlds into its fold. Uniting the scattered and, frankly, disenfranchised Humanity under one banner they could be proud of.
One that told their story, of how they rose and conquered the stars around them.
How they survived the longest and most brutal war their species has waged.
After the reunification was complete, the Coalition began to send out colony vessels to have Man expand out of the old borders of the old Human civilization. The current colonies were running low on resources, and Earth itself was nothing more than a city-planet.
Man found many worlds alien to the ones he came from, ones that boggled the minds of scientists for generations. Many of them were starkly different from the colonies or Earth, possessing alien characteristics or once-thought to be impossible geographic formations. Things that, at one point, would be considered utterly impossible.
These new worlds were a true testimony to the unpredictable, sheer chaotic randomness of the universe. Showing the inexplicable nature of reality in easily observable ways.
Many of the new worlds became popular tourist spots for their often alien nature. Those deemed “normal” enough became mining worlds to help fuel the growing Coalition. Their minerals being extracted and sent to the more major colonies processing, in turn being sent to Earth to meet its resource demands. The resources would be, in turn, used to build all sorts of wonderful things! From hand-computers to star dreadnoughts ten kilometers long. From handguns, to 3D printers. From cribs, to android gestation tubes. The new worlds allowed for technologies to be improved, upgraded. Even the once risky Kojikia Engines had their faults removed, perfecting them. This would, of course, put an end to pirate raids on failed-to-jump vessels. The raids, which had been a cause for the Era of Betrayal, had finally been stopped. More than two-hundred years after the first planets began to argue over the solutions.
Always building, improving, colonizing, and discovering.
That was the current state of the Coalition.
Now, a colony ship drifts in space. Headed towards a world Mankind never knew existed. One that would be so similar to His homeworld, yet so alien at the same time. A world that held the one thing Man has been looking for throughout the ages. Something that, despite all the world’s He controlled, always eluded His grasp. Something he knew was out there.
Intelligent life.
