1 A Brief History of Time

A stream of alien starships aligned in an extremely complicated three dimensional formation was facing a rag tag team of ill equipped corvettes. Despite being encircled from all angles, this rag tag group of corvettes were valiantly whizzing around trying to take down as many of their opponents as they could - they were literal kamikaze pilots at this moment. Unfortunately, the odds were just too stacked in opposition to them and through sheer numbers and a precise formation the goliath like opposition destroyed their rag tag opponents.

A large wall of text in red blood suddenly enveloped this space, blaring out the words Game Over!, causing the person behind the controller to give up his joystick in frustration. His eyes were clear and even a little innocent, but his facial expressions betrayed a rebellious attitude with a bit of mischief. His brown pupils matched the color of his messy hair. Beside him a buddy of his, similarly aged at sixteen, chuckled and shook his head.

"These games about star fleets fighting are so unrealistic, Will!" The friend chided the boy for his obsession with this grand strategy space conflict game. Will wasn't fazed by his friend Clive's attitude. He responded in kind for perhaps the millionth time. "This game isn't about realism, it's about training the mind to think strategically. Plus who doesn't dream about the stars?"

Who doesn't dream about the stars indeed. Ever since the renaissance, human civilization had always looked towards the stars. Dreamt to go beyond the boundaries of the planet, beyond the confines of the sun and explore distant stars and galaxies unknown. Was there life in the universe? These questions plagued scholars and philosophers alike for centuries. Will sighed in disappointment. Who would have thought that the unstoppable march of human progress would stagnate so dramatically?

The year was 3020 of the common era. Hover cars still aren't a reality. That, however, wasn't due to lack of technological advancements, but simply due to how inefficient they were as a travel source and how three dimensional automated vehicular control was a significantly more computationally taxing algorithmic process than traditional surface based transportation systems. Nuclear Fusion had become a reality and humanity had surpassed the problem of energy dependence on non renewable and polluting sources of power.

Humanity was no longer bound to a single planet. Slowly and steadily, over the course of a thousand years of gradual improvement, the civilization had become a stellar one. Most of the terrestrial planets and moons in the Solar system had been colonized and 'segregated' - a technical term for creating specific habitable zones on these unrelenting non-habitable surfaces, while the gas giants had become large reservoirs for all kinds of important resources.

Yet, William thought that progress had saturated in such a glorious present. Why? It was because the laws of the universe themselves conspired to freeze humanity's scale of progress. All those theories about traveling at near light speeds, bending space time to create warp points or jump drives were mere flights of fancy debunked by further explorations of science. Even a thousand years after the first rockets were invented, humanity still used rockets, only now powered by fusion. These rockets, however were only feasible for travel within the Solar system. Even in the year 3020, the first probes sent to the next nearest star system, the Centauri Star Cluster, had only covered around thirty percent of its journey.

While the Solar System was a bustling place, humanity as a whole had realized quickly that any ambitions to expand their influence beyond the primary star was simply technologically infeasible. While a small group of persevering researchers still focused on this means of interstellar travel and a study of the cosmos, most had instead turned inwards. Striving towards understanding the fundamental forces of the universe at the small scale and improving applications and efficiency of tools and ideas that were already validated.

Things were at a relatively peaceful plateau until a hundred years earlier, when these small groups of persevering cosmic researchers made a shocking discovery. Intelligent Alien Life! The answer to the age old question about life had been finally answered! The initial discovery was met with both excitement and also trepidation. The question loomed on everyone's minds - would they be coexisting peacefully or hostile? Were they stronger or weaker than us? Research into aliens suddenly began flourishing once more with an unimaginable speed. Better telescopes, better radiation signature observation stations and a renewed focus on the topic led to a remarkable number of discoveries. Within a thousand light year radius of the Sun were three other stellar level civilizations at the scale of earth. None of the alien civilizations discovered had managed to venture beyond their star systems.

This discovery tempered both the excitement and the trepidation. The fact that no multistellar civilization could be discovered (and they would be the first to be discovered due to their sheer scale) reinforced the point that technology had a steep limit at this civilizational scale when it came to expansion and exploration. The universe was just too vast and life rare enough to stratify that any contact between different alien civilizations at small time scales was essentially unfeasible. Aliens did exist, but we were so far apart from each other that any contact, friendly or otherwise was simply impossible within several generations.

Yet, the revelations led to a dramatic change in the management of the human civilization as a whole. The Planetary nations formed a united council under the banner of the Star Council, which made absolute decisions about the future of human interactions beyond the solar system. The Star Council led a multiplanetary mobilization effort to create a detection shield around the solar system to stop other alien species to be able to track our location, that continues to this day. At the same time, any efforts private or otherwise to try and establish contact with alien civilizations was strictly banned.

At the same time, the various planetary governments declassified a set of results that shook human civilization even more than the discovery of aliens. An experiment to simulate a controllable blackhole created a space fracture that led into a bizarre world. The technology to access this world - the realm of continuity - as the governments were calling it, had been stabilized and these Realm Gates had been set up on every inhabited planet. The governments then created a streamlined process to allow every person of age to enter and explore this "Realm of Continuity".