You live in the USRE heartlands of Western Europe. You are part of a small commune that operates under the Office of Rice — you're a technician tasked with enforcing continental regulations regarding landscape connectivity, specialised in the ecosystemic management of hedgerows. It is a quiet life in a quiet land. Winters are harsh, with temperatures well below zero and freezing winds; summers are brutal, with days upon days of high wet bulb temperatures and dust storms carried from the Spanish deserts. Springs and autumns are gentler, but they're also the seasons of floods — humidity comes from the Atlantic in torrential rains that erase the meanders and reshape the land every odd year. Your village stands atop a hill, sheltered from rain and wind alike by ancient oaks that were planted two decades before USRE tanks arrived in Europe and broke the last remnants of the continental fortress. Yet, they are not enough. It is common for a storm to leave a few houses without a roof, for failing air conditioning to force an evacuation during a heatwave, or for a flood to destroy the bridges that lead to the valley below. Constant rebuilding is a fact of life. Nothing lasts forever in these lands. Every ten to fifteen years, a pandemic hits — it often begins with wild birds, but every so often the animal carriers can't even be identified. Gone are the days when coronaviruses and influenza could wipe out entire communities at once, now your monads can produce on-demand antibodies and casualties are rare. Yet, they hurt the community. You've lost three house cats in ten years; Josie, your neighbour, had to cull her goat herd twice in the same timeframe. A bout of coronavirus gave you a bad cough that comes back every spring, and there's chronic inflammation in your lungs.

Agriculture remains hard. Most of the topsoil has been depleted during the industrial age, and the lower valley is a ragged landscape of limestone slabs and ill-looking trees that struggle to find nutrients — your commune complements its crops with two vertical farms that surge from the forest like the marble-clad pillars of a pagan temple. They are not always enough. When the world is in turmoil — when the Indian monsoon fails, when Ukrainian wheat doesn't come, when a hypercane keeps the nuclear ships in port — you start counting beans. Eighteen years ago, all your crops died in a hailstorm; the Office of Rice had to send airships packed with emergency rations for an entire winter. Without the watchful umbrella of the USRE, you would have died a teenager, but thanks to planetary solidarity, you've never starved. You can't even say you've ever been hungry. Yet, you're smaller, less muscular and lighter than your distant ancestors. You know this because of the bones.

Oh, the bones. Every time Josie ploughs her fields, she unearths a bunch. You've become an expert at identifying them. A war ravaged the region during the early Low Age and, for a few gruelling months, the frontline passed right through your commune. You've mapped it with Josie's finds — skeletons that mostly belong to adult males, scattered amidst fossilised treelines and old trenches, missing limbs and jaws, with anti-personnel fléchettes and hand-to-hand claws buried deep in their bones. It's not rare to stumble upon a mine. You've built a robotic assistant to dispose of them, name's Cauliflower, it's the size of a small dog and beeps happily when you direct it towards an unexploded device. You're on its fifth iteration — Cauliflower I to IV have been blown to kingdom come. Now and then, Josie comes back home with gnarlier disoveries. A small, scorched skull, complete with milk teeth; an adult skeleton clutching to a housepet; a mummified corpse, found kneeling in the swamp with a bullet in the back of the head. These relics come from the post-war period, when Fortress Europe closed its borders and began murdering the undesirables. 

You try not to think too much about it. You're living on the borderlands, after all — they've always been a theater of war, from the Roman conquest to the USRE invasion. You focus on your work. You're monitoring hedgehog populations, helping Josie with the farm, corresponding with biologists from New Delhi who've developed selective pesticides against invasive knotweed, engineering new river meanders; at the end of the week, you're leaving the village for the mountains, going on long walks and visiting the radiotelescope that overlooks the valley.

One day, you take the train to the city with Josie — she needs a new tractor, and you've never been there in years, so why not? There's a new museum in town, built with funds from the Old Well, the USRE office for research and education. It is about the Earth, not as you know it, but as it was before the Low Age. Inside, you find images and artefacts from the time before the collapse. You immerse yourself in a world where pine trees aren't endangered, where winters are warm and summers are cool, where hypercanes do not even exist, where intercontinental air travel isn't a luxury, where New York, Bordeaux and Abidjan are not underwater. You see 3D models of long-extinct species, of deer and sparrows and foxes, of aspen trees and trouts and frogs. You read accounts of a planet where the Amazon isn't a dry savannah, where Great Britain isn't a freezing wasteland, where India isn't a dust bowl. You grasp a glimpse of what the Earth used to be — of a world richer in all dimensions, in all domains of human experience. A world whose killers have won. That's the sharpest truth of the early Low Age, you understand. The necrocapitalists won. They gorged themselves on the accumulated wealth of the late industrial era, pushed the world to the brink, line goes up, again and again and, when the time of collapse came, retreated to their bunkers and paradisaic enclaves to live out the rest of their days in peace. Some were punished, yes. Bunkers were breached. Space stations were shot down. Mind uploads were erased. But by and large, the necrocapitalists made it. When USRE armoured divisions pushed through Europe, two centuries ago, they found necropolises hiding underneath the ruined capitals, but they were not places of tragedy. The corpses contained within had died well into the mid-Low Age, old, plump and in good health, fed and cared for by hordes of lobotomised servants and enslaved artificial intelligences. There will be no justice. There will be no retribution.

And there is no coming back. As you make your way back home, the train humming on the track, you start feeling ill-at-ease. The oaks look like the rearguard of a long-gone army, holding on to a landscape swept away by the Low Ag, their trunks diminutive and their branches crooked compared to the giants of old. The mundane chronic diseases running in your blood feel as they're a punishment from the Earth itself. The clouds above the snowless mountains are the looming heralds of yet another freak meteorological event, of another summer afternoon that would have looked like the apocalypse for your ancestors. The silence of the woods, which only a day ago was serene music to your ears, is now but the droning whisper of a mausoleum. You see frailty everywhere — in the paucity of the underwood, in the rolling dust under the tracks, in the banks that saw a thousand floods, in the slopes that will never be snow-touched again, in the burning clarity of the morning sky, in the mountains of bones under the hills, even in Josie's smile lines, inked in her skin by salt and sunburn and chemical waste.

It will be a long summer; enter the season of grief.

Illustration by Thomas Boone for Eclipse Phase, distributed by Posthuman Studios under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike 3.0 Unported Licence.

Every single time.

Every single orbit below 300 km.

Whether you are a High Fleet combat vessel or a puny tug looking for a dead satellite. Doesn't matter. 

Gaia Station sends the first warnings when you are within ten minutes of flying over the continental United States. You deploy the radiators and switch the anti-debris laser grid to maximal intensity, burst fire, which hopefully should be enough to take down their ageing ASAT missiles. You switch your primary and secondary IFF on, making sure you're broadcasting your identification to the whole world. When your orbit starts covering the continental United States, NORAD pings you once from their automated arrays. You must answer within twenty seconds and broadcast your identification and mission statement to them; otherwise they'll open fire immediately. Once this is done, you wait for the answer — but by that point, most ship operators have resumed their usual tasks. NORAD is annoying, but it has ceased being scary a good three hundred years ago. When the USA stopped existing, I guess.

The United States of America, indeed, do not exist.

Or rather: they are the only known example of a liminal state that exists purely through remanent inertia. As of today, the population of the continental United States is purely vestigial and estimated at 10 to 25 million inhabitants (depending on the definition of “continental US”), mostly concentrated on the north-western shore. Five major waves of emigration in the early, mid and late Low Age have effectively emptied the continental US of their inhabitants — culturally and linguistically speaking, the centre of the American diaspora is now Mexico. The vast majority of American cities, infrastructure and agricultural areas are in a state of complete disrepair, overgrown by vegetation and ravaged by climate change — and yet, there is still something that can be considered as the sovereign United States of America, if one is willing to stretch the definition of “state” to include an autonomous defence grid.

The reason the USA still exist — even as an algorithmic ghost — is one of simple arithmetic. The autonomous US command (AUSCOM) and its algorithms control about 6,000 nuclear warheads. Most of them are little more than relics of the industrial age, but USRE intelligence estimates that about 500 to 400 warheads could credibly be launched by AUSCOM in response to a perceived threat, or in preparation of an attack. High Fleet and Laniakean space assets could intercept between 50 to 60% of these warheads from LEO, while ground-based interceptors could handle 30 to 35% of the threats. As far as we know, AUSCOM does not have any remaining second strike capabilities since its last ballistic submarine drone sank two decades ago in the Bering Strait. Nevertheless, the possibility of a major city (probably in either Russia or China, considering how AUSCOM operates on pre-Low Age geopolitics) being destroyed by a nuclear strike is very real. For better or worse, the United States of America are still relevant, by sheer force of arms if nothing else.

(Addendum: to be clear, the question is not whether we can win a war against AUSCOM — we would mop the floor with it. The question, and the problem, is that we can't do it without potentially sacrificing millions).

From a technical standpoint, AUSCOM is not an AI system. It is a set of algorithms, applying logical instructions with little to no regard for the outside world. In a sense, AUSCOM is a striking example of “artificial stupidity” — an AI would have realized long ago that the world has changed, and its instructions are not relevant anymore. AUSCOM algorithms are unable to do so. They are thus doomed to repeat the last orders given to them by the American government before it collapsed: maintain the integrity of the continental United States at all costs. And so AUSCOM did for centuries, with its network of combat drones, autonomous soldiers and WMDs. And so AUSCOM still does, even though the USA does not exist anywhere else but in its databanks. AUSCOM is hyper-focused. It cannot do anything besides defend the USA, and leverage autonomous factories to create the means to do so. This is why Northern America was bled dry of its inhabitants. AUSCOM cannot build non-military infrastructure or indeed maintain a working state, but it cannot allow civilians to do so either, as any attempt at rebuilding an American state in the past was flagged as a threat to the US (a secession, in effect) and promptly squashed with cold brutality. In theory, the US President (elected or acting) could order AUSCOM to stand down, but the emergency override is DNA-coded and the line of succession forgotten in history. It is even quite likely that AUSCOM removed it entirely in its perpetual quest for self-improvement.

The “good” news, in a sense, is that AUSCOM doesn't have any drive to conquer or interfere with the world — which comes as somewhat of a surprise for an autonomous military-industrial complex: we can just speculate that AUSCOM did not, by default, integrate offensive instructions for foreign policy. As such, AUSCOM drones and strikes will stop at American borders, except for reconnaissance drones that sometimes fly over the continent (they often fail in flight; a few cultures have made a tradition of carving small shrines and amulets out of drone wrecks, especially in Latin America.). AUSCOM launches rockets sporadically, but most of these attempts end up in failure due to the dire state of American infrastructure. One out of ten manages to deploy satellites. We don't interfere and just make sure they're not an orbital threat — AUSCOM would probably fire the nukes if we were to destroy these satellites.

(Addendum: AUSCOM combat drones were state-of-the-art during the Low Age, and were rightly regarded as the equivalent of eerie, invincible monsters by the survivors. In the present day, they are hopelessly outdated, but it doesn't prevent them from still being a threat. A recent report estimated that, without a nuclear strike, a conventional invasion of AUSCOM territory would mobilize one third of the USRE military for a year.)

The general attitude towards AUSCOM on Earth is to live and let live. The autonomous defence grid is a thorn in the side of both Laniakea and the USRE, and keeps a looming nuclear sword over the world, but destroying it is too dangerous at present, and the non-sentient nature of the network makes negotiation effectively impossible. Considering that AUSCOM is completely isolated, without access to resources outside the cannibalizing of American ruins, the most realistic course of action is to let entropy do its work, and enable the network to collapse in due time. It is, however, taking more time than anticipated, as AUSCOM was built for resilience, and is expected to remain online for a few decades, possibly even a century. There have been numerous plans to forcefully put the algorithm down. The High Fleet once proposed a kinetic decapitation strike carried out from orbital vessels, but it was considered as too dangerous. Likewise, while modern AIs could compromise AUSCOM in a matter of minutes and take control of it, the risk of rogue or unconnected elements enacting a retaliatory strike has been deemed to high.

AUSCOM is there to stay, one of the last remnants of the world that came before.

Illustration: Steve Jurvetson, Flickr. 

An account of the Sequence assault on Draugr in the Serene Sea, ten years ago, which according to Sequence traditions was meant to be the beginning of a region-wide crusade.

The first contact with Sequence attackers occurred at T+0 hours, when the sensors on Draugr orbital bases detected a massive, grouped emission coming from the vicinity of Lich, the second and outermost planet in the system. In hindsight, these emissions corresponded to the collective deceleration burn of the Sequence vanguard albeit at that time, even though Sequence warships were known and already classified as hostile, the emission only created confusion among Algorab personnel. At T+30 minutes, the L1 and L2 stations orbiting Lich were destroyed and lost with all hands. Shortly after, two survey vessels diverted towards the emissions, Eccentric Cycles and Cause of Paperwork, were destroyed as well. In the first opening hour of the attack, Algorab lost 867 members, the majority of its personnel on Lich. The only vessel to be spared was This Side Up, a USRE messenger vessel that managed to evacuate its berth and leave the system after broadcasting an emergency message. At T+2 hours, Lich was hit by three relativistic kill vehicles (RKVs) which shattered the planet's crust and sealed the fate of the remaining personnel who had not evacuated.

At T+5 hours, Algorab's armed detachment of twenty-seven combat vessels, helmed by Calm and Orderly Fashion under Azches' command, met with the Sequence vanguard halfway to Lich. The following minutes saw three vessels fall victim to UREB (Ultra-relativistic electron beams) weapons before the human ships could reorganize and fire back. At T+6 hours and thirty minutes, the first destruction of a Sequence vessel by a human ship was registered as Luciole Interceptor Pointy Bit Towards Thrust scored two direct missile hits on a Sequence Chapel, shattering its antimatter containment field. A confused battle started to ravage the cold skies, several light-hours from Draugr.

At T+12 hours, Azches was finally capable of assessing the enemy's strength, which made it clear that there was no way the local Algorab units could stem the incoming tide of Sequence ships, even with the advantage conferred by the geometry drive. The AI decided to engage in delaying actions, ordering her ships to stay out of UREB range and perform “drive-by” FTL missile attacks targeted at enemy engines, with the goal of forcing as many ships as possible to miss their final deceleration burn and overshoot Draugr. At T+12 hours and 25 minutes, Starmoth Initiative vessel Don't Look Back was crippled by a glancing Chapel shot, becoming the first human ship to survive a UREB hit.

Between T+15 hours and T+25 hours, the battle kept raging on as the Sequence fleet surged towards Draugr at a punishing 9 gees of acceleration. More than fifty RKVs were spotted en route to Draugr: they were all destroyed by direct FTL missile impacts, albeit this successful defensive action further reduced Azches' already half-empty ammunition reserves. Human ships maintained a moving barrier of missiles in front of Sequence vessels, however this form of attrition warfare did not wield tactical results beyond Sequence ship losses. The enemy was still bound to reach Draugr.

At T+27 hours, the last missile was fired by Peace Treaty, and Azches ordered her fleet to retreat well behind the planet and towards the neutron star. At this point, the entirety of the Algorab Expeditionary Corps had been scrambled towards Draugr, now the focal point of all military operations in the Serene Sea. Cargo ships were surging towards the system, filled to the brim with every single FTL missile available in the region, while the commune was sending help requests with messenger probes bound towards Communal Space. USRE messenger ship This Side Up had reached its mysterious destination, an unassuming brown dwarf system fifty lightyears away from Draugr.

The planet itself was left defenceless, save from hastily converted mass drivers.

At T+29 hours, the Sequence vanguard entered Draugr's high orbit. A fair share of the fleet had been damaged or destroyed, while several dozen incapacitated ships now drifted in darkness, unable to decelerate, but the remaining firepower was greater than what the entirety of humankind could muster. All stations surrounding Draugr were destroyed within the following hour, and with them almost a thousand people who had not been evacuated yet by lack of available vessels. Bypassing Draugr's moon entirely, the Sequence vessels started attacking the Old Forest directly with kinetic vehicles and UREB artillery, drawing burning glyphs in the planet's worldwide vegetation cover. As soon as the first projectiles hit, Algorab sensors all over the planet detected a massive energy surge caused by the redirection of all sap flows in the planet, followed by the spontaneous digestion of up to 76% of the Old Forest's nodes.

At T+30 hours, the planet screamed. The Old Forest's synapses started emitting a high frequency, all-spectrum pulse that Algorab survivors recall like a “wave that rattled your very mind”. While human equipment was merely disturbed by the Wail, as it came to be known later, Sequence ships were downright crippled during the emission, with their seemingly organic hull regeneration systems starting devouring themselves and their synthetic arrays visibly melting in infrared.

In the following twenty minutes, the collective mind of the Sequence vanguard changed its plans and turned its attention towards Draugr's moon, probably in an attempt to acquire a stable firing position whose structure would be impervious to the Wail. Three battle-defining events happened within the following quarter of an hour.

At T+31 hours, Algorab Farseer-class cargo vessel Lightjammer evacuated its crew then started to accelerate in deep space. At T+31 hours and 7 minutes, Azches' reinforced fleet launched a two-pronged attack against the Sequence fleet, which was focused on burning the moon to the ground with UREB beams, carving deep molten canyons in the crust. Finally, USRE High Fleet Firebase In Your Heart Shall Burn translated in high orbit, completely unannounced, under the cover of the planet. Helmed by a certain Elisabeth Hoyle, it claimed to be responding to a distress call. Azches did not mind. She needed every ship she could muster. 

At T+34 hours, while the moon had become but a hellish landscape of vitrified glass still populated by a few unlucky souls and automated defence systems, the planet screamed again. Perhaps the Old Forest had realized the strength of its enemy. Perhaps the first scream had been a test run, but in any case, the second Wail was devastating. Several human ships reported massive damage to electronics, electrical surges through the hull, geometry drive interference and bouts of temporary madness among their crews, but it was nothing compared to the Sequence ships. Horrified navigators report hearing what sounded like cries of pain in garbled static as many Sequence vessels erupted and melted from the inside, turning into grotesque versions of themselves, metal-organic splatter turned upside down and disassembled in space, like intestines burning under the harsh light of the neutron star.

At T+35 hours, Lightjammer stopped accelerating and brutally translated away towards a set of coordinates transmitted by one of the few surviving drones on the moon. The cargo vessel re-emerged a mere ten kilometres away from one of the two Orrery-class Sequence ships leading the assault on the moon. Though its terminal velocity was way lower than that of an FTL missile, its mass was several orders of magnitude higher. The cargo ship slammed into the Sequence vessel, whose weakened bio-hull absorbed the blow, then slowly gave away until the Farseer collapsed the antimatter containment systems. Both ships disappeared in a massive implosion which showered the moon with debris — the first successful, albeit crude, application of suicide burns in the Serene Sea war. 

At T+36 hours a third, weaker Wail surged across Draugr's orbit, and for the first time in a day and a half, the Sequence vessels turned tail and ran, illuminating the vicinity of the planet with myriads of engine plumes the colour of molten stars. The second Orrery ship, which Algorab suspected to be the personal ship of a Presence (a Sequence mind made of self-conscious baroque representations), lagged behind, covering the retreat of its armada. Azches seized the opportunity. 

At T+35 hours and 15 minutes, the last act of the battle opened with a coordinated attack on the Orrery vessel, led by five drone Luciole Interceptors. They were promptly cauterized by the Orrery's powerful UREB array, but they were nothing more than decoys. The real offensive was led by In Your Heart Shall Burn, which translated at point-blank range and engaged the Orrery in a knife fight, almost hull against hull. A gratuitous duel, led only to avenge the deaths of Lich, which lasted for more than twenty-seven seconds, an eternity in such an engagement. In Your Heart Shall Burn took three UREB shots in its mainframe, which severed half its radiators from the fuselage, detached its engine section from the rest of the ship and killed half its crew when the third glancing hit melted through the ablative armour. In return, the Firebase showered the Orrery with intense laser fire, which at this range was accurate enough to disable the UREB array and pierce the organic armour through sheer saturation. For a split-second, Elisabeth Hoyle held her ship ready to translate away, convinced the Sequence vessel would self-destruct, but the antimatter explosion never came. The Orrery slowly flipped around, dropped its remaining UREB and came to a halt half an hour later. It had surrendered. In Your Heart Shall Burn was recovered two hours later, drifting in space with its hull molten and still gleaming hot. The rest of the armada pushed its engines to 15 gees to leave the system. Azches, knowing how weakened her fleet was and fearing a feigned retreat, gave the order not to pursue. 

The battle of Draugr was over. 

In total, 2,500 human beings, AI included, lost their lives during the battle of Draugr, not even a footnote compared to the great wars of the Sequence. 17 human ships were lost with all hands on board. In return, the Sequence left seventy-two Chapels in the system and two Orreries. The captured Orrery was towed around Lich, and though it did not contain a Presence as first expected, its housed something far stranger: a horde of small blob-like creatures, the organic lumpenproletariat of the ship that had devoured its Sequence “crew” and taken control of the vessel in the midst of battle, probably awakened by the initial Wail. Though only sub-sapient, they had enough awareness to recognize humans as an enemy of the Sequence. 

Lich was left ravaged, covered in vitrified rock and molten debris and, officially, has not been reoccupied ever since. Algorab's science division would take decades to recover from the attack, which had decapitated its leadership and in many ways it could be argued that it never truly rebuilt itself, with Azches' power reinforced by the battle and Algorab becoming even more focused on battling the Sequence. The surprise attack on Draugr, decades in the making, would be the main motivation behind the construction of Adowa Point and its early warning system. The USRE has made no effort to justify the presence of at least one heavily armed ship on Algorab territory, albeit the ravens, strangely enough, have yet to emit an official complaint. 

Draugr would spend nearly a decade recovering from both the UREB-induced destruction and the straining effort endured to create the Wails, a phenomenon which is still ill-understood, though it proved that the Old Forest was no stranger to the Sequence. Had it faced them before? Was it merely territorial, or was it capable of understanding the strategic situation? Was it just defending itself, or defending something else — for instance, something that would lie hidden beneath the distant surface of Draugr? 

Regardless, Draugr still stands, and neither Algorab nor the Old Forest have ended their watch. 

Starlight Temple on Station Zero as drawn by Elodie Sauveterre using remote sensing data. It is believed to be the origin point of the distress beacon signal.

The Laniakea expedition is one of the most famous journeys ever carried out by the Starmoth Initiative. This ten thousand lightyear venture proved that long-range one-ship expeditions were viable, cast a new light on the Sequence and uncovered an unknown human civilisation.

Thirty-two years ago, the Algorab Organisation commissioned a secret expedition to the very edge of the Milky Way, sending a small group of ships nicknamed “Zero Fleet” seeking for what Algorab believed to be the ancient homeworlds of the Sequence. It took Zero Fleet almost a decade to reach its destination — or rather it should have because contact was lost as the ships crossed the inter-arm void between the Perseus Arm and the Outer Arm. The fleet's last message, relayed by a series of Von Neumann probes, was a distress signal, albeit it was confusing and unclear. Though Algorab's endeavour was only known to a select few, the Starmoth Initiative immediately answered the call. By chance (some would say fate) a Starmoth Initiative expedition was in its last stages of preparation in Mundis when Zero Fleet's message reached settled space. The Initiative changed the expedition's nature on the fly and what should have been a simple inter-arm reconnaissance run turned into a ten thousand lightyears rescue mission carried out by Inyanga class vessel Laniakea.

Laniakea departed Mundis under the supervision of navigator Elodie Sauveterre twenty-one years ago.

At that point in time, Laniakea was probably the single most capable starship operated by the Starmoth Initiative. Relying on a highly experienced crew, it had the potential to operate for decades in complete isolation and the Butterfly-class modifications attached to its geometry drive meant that it could cross the inter-arm void at a much faster rate than Zero Fleet. However, even for such an advanced vessel, the journey proved to be long and gruelling. Past the surroundings of Mundis, Laniakea was operating in completely uncharted territory and had to create its own reference points for jump targets, relying on variable stars that had to be remapped every hundred lightyears. Its geometry drive proved less reliable than anticipated, and the ship had to stop for several weeks at a time to perform emergency repairs. Its only means of communication with the rest of human space were courier probes which were in limited supply. Yet, it carried on, leaving beacons and time capsules behind to guide future ships on its path if something was to go wrong. 

As it reached the Outer Cygnus arm, Laniakea started encountering deep space anomalies. Sequence-built megastructures anchored around stars or floating aimlessly in the interstellar void that would interfere with geometry jumps, blocking them or sending Laniakea in random directions. Elodie Sauveterre and her crew had to improvise new navigation techniques to go around these neutralization fields which slowed Laniakea even further. After a particularly damaging misjump, the ship had to stop by a habitable planet to make extensive repairs to its frame, using the opportunity to establish a small self-sustaining relay that would come to be known as Sauveterre's Respite.

Seven years into the expedition, Laniakea had yet to find any traces of Zero Fleet. The fleet had deviated from its intended path and had not left any beacons behind, which was starting to turn Laniakea's rescue attempt into a fool's errand. Without faster than light communications, the ship had no way to contact Zero Fleet…or what remained of it. As the galactic rim closed in, interferences became stronger and Laniakea found itself stuck in an all-aspect interdiction field created by a vast network of megastructures the size of solar systems. Determined to push on and reach Zero Fleet's supposed destination, Elodie Sauveterre took the only possible way: up. Laniakea surged towards the galactic roof to climb above the interdiction bubble. Three thousand lightyears above the galactic plane, Laniakea finally found a passage that would allow the ship to keep progressing towards the rim. During its descent, Laniakea started picking up strange radio signals emanating from a system at the galactic edge. These signals were indubitably human. More than that, they were carrying human-readable information: the accurate coordinates of Zero Fleet's final resting place.

But it was impossible, surely. These signals had travelled at the speed of light and came from a system one thousand lightyears away, which meant whoever had emitted them was one thousand years old.

When Laniakea finally reached the origin system, it found an artificial Sequence ringworld orbiting a K-class star, right along the galactic edge. The habitable megastructure was home to a small indigenous human civilisation that had reached a technological level comparable to 1980s humanity. At the barycentre of the orbital were the battered hulls of Zero Fleet's ships, cratered by ten centuries of micrometeorite impacts.

And then it dawned on Elodie Sauveterre and her crew as they went through the few remaining ship logs. Confronted with the same obstacle as Laniakea, Zero Fleet had attempted an extremely long-range translation over more than three thousand lightyears to escape the Sequence megastructures. This translation, paired with Sequence interference, had backfired completely, breaking the safety measures that usually prevented a geometry drive from travelling in time.

Zero Fleet had reached its intended target.

One thousand years in the past.

Confronted to this unprecedented situation, Elodie Sauveterre decided to avoid interfering with the orbital's local civilisation, mark the position of the system and come back to Mundis using the same route it had used to reach the galactic edge — a route that would come to be known as the Laniakea Run. Upon re-establishing contact with the Starmoth Initiative, she decided to call the orbital “Station Zero” in honour of the Algorab fleet. Later the same year, Laniakea went back to Station Zero with a complete exploration fleet that deployed beacons to formally establish the Laniakea run as an official deep space route and build two permanent observation posts at Station Zero and Sauveterre's Respite. The full implications of the Laniakea expedition — involving the time-travel capacity of the geometry drive and the Sequence's derelict megastructure empire — are still a topic of active research and remain shrouded in mystery by the Initiative.

I feel fine.

Focused.

Eyes aimed at the sky.

Clouds above. Low and grey. Snow covers the hills and forests. Down in the valley, the launch towers surge towards the snowy mist, and the railways leading to them look like ejecta from an asteroid crater. The inside of the train is warm. The world around me is white and grey. Smooth. Devoid of asperities. Serene.

Hours.

They’re speaking all around me, engineers and scientists. I can barely hear them. The wind whispers around me carry my hair in the snow. Sixty heartbeats per minute. Blood flowing up and down. Warm. I do not feel the cold. My body measures it, but I do not feel it. The launcher has achieved its journey towards the pad. It stands here, a white tower in the middle of the valley. Silent.

Hours.

Through the visor of the helmet, I can see a porthole and through the porthole, I can see the clouds. The capsule is a small spherical coffin and it stands at the top of a massive tower of explosives. When the door closed on me, my heartbeat surged a little, from sixty to seventy beats per minute. Now it calmed down. Everything is nominal again. The snow isn’t falling anymore. It’s pouring. The sky is descending on the plain. The world is white. Silent.

Minutes.

Fire and fury. Seven hundred tons of fuel ignited below me. A bright flame scraping the snow. And suddenly, it moves. The launcher vibrates, trembles, erupts. I feel like the entirety of the sky is pushing against my chest.

Minutes.

A heavy thump echoes through the launcher. First stage separation. Words on the radio. My lizard brain answers them in a pure reflex. The rest of my consciousness wanders away. The clouds are gone, and with them the smoothness of the world. The sky is now blue and sharp. The light is blinding. The air so thin over the curve of the Earth. The weight on my chest is decreasing. Sixty heartbeats per minute. All systems nominal.

Minutes.

A second, lower thump. Second stage separation. Orbital insertion burn. Then something surges through my spine. Something primal. Pure bliss. Weightlessness. Engine thrust set to zero. The world has become smooth again alongside the thin curve of the high atmosphere, way, way below me. Eyes locked on the horizon. Axial tilt zero.

Seconds.

I open my hand and my pencil floats away. I am falling at several hundred meters per second and everything around me is following me, but the Earth is spherical and I never hit the ground. This is called an orbit. This is all there is to me right now. A long curve around the Earth, four hundred kilometres above the surface. They are asking questions on the radio. I am answering them, mechanically. Training has taken over. My mind is somewhere else. Somewhere brighter.

Seconds.

Down below, the ocean, then the continents, then the ocean again. Up above, there are no stars. The light of the sun is blade-sharp. The pencil is coming back towards me. I catch it. Earth below, space above, I am straddling the limit. Suspended in the void. Sixty heartbeats per minute. Weightless.

I was born in the seventeenth year of the fourth century of the Low Age. I am the first human being to reach low earth orbit since the thermal-industrial world devoured itself.

I feel fine.

Focused.

Eyes aimed at the Earth.