Nations died the day Earth did.
Heritage was left in the dust, embers that roared with hunger for the ghosts of those who stayed. Languages, culture, the beauty of the oceans- the intensity of the jungles, the calm of the plains. Burnt cinder and glass, leaving a charred rock barren of all it once held.
The worst loss was of the bravery, the defiance. They told themselves that it should have been them in their place, but deep down, even the most grief stricken survivors knew it couldn't have gone any differently. What had passed, had passed long ago.
Those ships had sailed, and none had survived the wrath of war.
The brave ones had died, so they could live.
They were the young and the old, the weak and the dedicated- the genius and the prime. They were the future now, they were the purpose. They were the reason for everything, staring off the edge of a never ending cliff into the abyss.
Large shoes to fill for so few, just a tiny fraction of what was once a great race. Millions, in the shadow of billions upon billions, which lay restless in a graveyard of bones that stretched across the black sky behind the great journey of ringed ships, and swirled with the currents of a galaxy that had abandoned them, as much as they had it.
The lights of stars judged them with deep indifference, as it taunted them, in a manner of uncaring grace.
“What are you going to do now?” It seemed to laugh, “Now that the best of you have died? Why would it matter to me what becomes of your race?”
A cold and uncaring laugh, from a beauty that knew no master, pity, or love.
Humanity did not reply.
Instead it took a long collective look upon itself, for what it was. What was mankind if not the greatest? All challenges had been overcome by the collective effort, quickened by the breakthroughs of individuals, and never before had mankind truly been defeated by anything but themselves. Now, here in the strange dark of the void, it was obvious to all that their best had not been enough, and they had been destroyed.
A terrible feeling. A humbling revelation.
No one was the best now. They were united in their failure, cohesive in this bond of shared loss- for they had all lost something.
Or someone.
It hurt- it was deep and terrible pain, to know they were gone forever. Stripped from the arms of lovers, from the hands of brothers and sisters, from the embrace of friends. They could not forgive, and they could not go back.
That pain was channeled, and grief became a fuel.
They couldn't go back. Not yet.
The soil of their new home was rough, harsh, and cold. Their world was livable, but hostile. Life was new to it, and it did not wish to be tamed. Resistance, though- was futile. Human hands did not care if they were bloodied, and did not care for what the new world thought it was. It was theirs now- and they brought it to heel soon enough.
The ground- fighting them at every turn, found it was nothing but a purpose to be taken and molded, in the image of a memory- in the shadow of something greater, that had once been. This rough world would be a monument to all they once had, and it would be treated with a hard kindness deserved for another- now but a ball of glass.
A dead grain of sand, floating through Sol and souls, millions of years away.
Mankind has always used tragedy as a catalyst, in this- there was only a difference through scale.
Breakthroughs were a weekly event, as the purpose of humanity looking out at the stars pulled from why, to how? The brightest minds of mankind had lived, to guide the newer generations- and they dedicated more than lives to that effort. They gave up everything to kindle the flame. Ignorance was as dead as Earth- there was no place for it any longer. It could not hide behind nationality, culture, or religion; not when they were but a foggy memory of a prior generation.
Such things were hated. They had no place on this new ground to stand.
Humanity prospered, expanded, exploded in growth- millions grew and became millions more. The platform and groundwork of technology acted as a springboard. There was no finite or inefficient fuel- the sun of the new age brought with it life- as solar and wind and geothermal energy was harassed. The sky was colonized quicker than the land beneath it- as the ring stations became a protective arc- shielding all those beneath them- sharing their bounties through beautiful strands of elevators. Giant ringed jellyfish of the alien skies.
It was three hundred Earth-years before they obtained the power of warp travel. A puzzle that held a key- that spurred them on. There was a secret of the universe, begging them to find it- wipe away the dust of unknown puzzles and problems, to become theirs- and theirs alone.
It was seven hundred Earth-years when they reached it. In the end, it had been so simple, so obvious.
The solution simply held in a matter of scale. All they had to do was cast a wider net- a much wider one. Of expressions that survived the dark flight, and the next generations of rebuilding- “Shoot for the stars” had kept its original meaning. It had also taken something of a sarcastic, and dark, undertone.
Of the years of research, and thousands of test runs- trillions of broadcasts, and decades of tinkering- it took on yet another. Of all the great idioms in language, this one truly did fit humanity in the greatest of affinities.
Project Icarus was the inevitable conclusion.
…