1 Energy and Souls

The first "breakthrough" humanity had in the 21st century was concerning energy. Ironically the best source of energy had always been solar energy or star energy to be exact, we just needed a more efficient way to get it and to store it in bigger quantities in smaller packages. The answer to that problem came from the sky, a meteorite that crashed on earth at the beginning of the century, 2020 to be exact, and ding ding ding, new material was discovered inside of the fallen rocks.

It was a new type of crystal if you can call it that, harder than a diamond but transparent as air itself with only an outline on the edges, quite fascinating to look at. More interesting was the fact that all pieces were round, perfect spheres. Somehow it only broke into three pieces when falling to earth, two huge pieces the size of a small stadium and a smaller one hardly above the size of a school, still big anyway. When the properties of the new mineral discovered came to light everyone wanted a piece, China and Russia got the big ones closer to them, and the USA sadly had to compromise with the smaller one, which later would bring a new problem.

The use of this new crystal, later called Pell(coming from pellucidity), was soon found after having contact with sunlight for just a few hours. It began to take a reddish color painting is glassy properties. It soon was discovered that it was absorbing solar energy without losing any of it.

After a few experiments, scientists found 2 important things, they could be cut, but each piece after some time molded itself into a perfect sphere again. the second discovery was that pells absorbed all kinds of light, the stronger and closer the light, the darker the red color on the pells became, after that the color changed to dark orange. It was quite easy to figure out how to get the energy out, it released on contact with metals, the flow stronger or weaker depending on the type of metal.

Intrigued by this, the scientists tried to test the limits of these crystals, and what they found changed the world. They started with small pieces of it, the pells went from a dark red to dark orange, to light orange, after that, in a much slower way, changed to a bright yellow, becoming full-on green and finally started to lose color and ended with a deep blue, and then stopped absorbing energy.

A Pell the size of a tennis ball was able to store enough energy to power a house for months, this discovery changed the world. The pells didn't follow the laws of physics as understood at the time.

The heat was easily absorbed by the pells and putting them in the sun for a few hours outside would solve your energy necessities for the day. The military found numerous uses for this and a new race between countries started. Lots of innovative technologies were created, and it became obvious that pells would become an essential part of society.

However, the amount of Pells was limited, the 3 pieces were cut into the smallest size possible, one centimeter in length was all they could get. And being the world power with less of it, the USA tried to recreate it. They were successful. Any knowledge of the procedure has been destroyed, censored, or highly classified to this day. The new material that they got after experimentation had some residual radiation that destroyed any biological matter it touched, no life could exist in the vicinity of that new material. This could only be contained for a while before it started liking and affecting the immediate surroundings. The new material was similar to pells, but apart from absorbing energy, it produced its own with time, slow but consistent. It was called sinpell.

But that was considered only a small nuisance when you could get huge amounts of energy production and storage out of it, so America, and after them, all countries, didn't stop creating sinpells for their new inventions, even after the big discovery of pells slow-growing, that came to be important on the downfall of natural pells.

You see, the sinpells didn't grow like normal pells, but when sinpells and pells touched, sinpells acquired the ability to grow and pells transformed rapidly to sinpells as well. Every single pell was used for this purpose, ending the hopes of a few that saw what was coming.

Technology advancement after that was like an explosion, just 10 years after that, we had spaceships in the solar system being feed by sinpells facing the sun. Massive sinpells were already located close to the sun just to absorb energy and changed when full.

"A Golden Era for humanity", they said at the time, until life couldn't be maintained on Earth anymore, after all, sinpells didn't come alone, radiation was there, waiting to be freed, killing everything in its path when it was. So a small window of crisis befell humanity. A solution was sought by all scientists in the world, but the hard truth was biological life would not survive if sinpells continued to be used, and of course, humanity made themselves dependable on it in every way, and even when prohibited and condemned, there was always someone making a new sinpell for their own benefit. So doom was approaching humanity and everyone knew that. Yet a new idea surfaced with a new discovery, the idea was to make new bodies, relying no on biological matter, but just technology and the discovery was the existence of souls.

The discovery of souls couldn't have happened in a better time. Weighing no more or less than 1 gram, it metaphysically resided in the brain, not really in any specific space but there. Found by accident by a machine made to do a better study of sinpells, being unsuccessful in doing that, when tried on the human body, that little part of us, or exactly us when later discovered, was found and surprisingly had some properties that would help on the crazy idea presented by scientists to avoid extinction.

By that time, the progress on machines was so advanced that all motion actions of a body and more could be recreated easily with technology. Our only problem was the connections needed for the control of such a body. There was already some success in connecting the brain and the nervous system with technology, but in a way, humans weren't wired to make such connections. It always felt different, not a part of oneself, nor an extension, but something foreigner that you have some level of control on.

There came humanity's other piece of miracle tech, real AI, not artificial life, that was as impossible to create as a new soul without the natural process. That was quite humbling for scientists when they couldn't evade that conclusion. After all, they had made space travel possible and understood human bodies to the point of remaking them with technology was just plain inefficient. They could make better bodies, just missing that one little piece that gave that body life.

And so, the second-best thing came to be, state-of-the-art AI, that understood, analyzed, and learned better than humans but wouldn't be more than just a fast car parked and ready to go anywhere but lacking the driver to give the instructions.

So easy was with those tools to make something that supported souls the same way a human body did. Apparently, sinpells, and most likely pells too, were able to house souls and gave some control of it to the soul, and so the energy foul for the new bodies was invented, and with that final piece, the new humanity was born.

They wouldn't have to worry about the deadly radiation anymore than a scarred Earth, after all, there was nothing biological in them anymore, no need for the planet that gave them life in the first place.

And they left it behind, left the solar system altogether, and relocated in a better system in their mind, one with 3 stars actually, the home of the planet KELT-4Ab, renamed Terra, in the memory of Earth, not that future generations would know that.