"Are you ready to go?" The voice crackled through the comms.
"Yes," Rain replied. "It's now or never."
Rain's heart was pumping faster than ever. Her hands sweaty from the gloves, and her expression being that of an excited child getting cotton candy at a theme park.
"Preparing launch of the Seven Thousand Year Project. Five. Four… Three… Two… One… Launch."
The lights flared. The Astral Thread made noise. What even is the Astral Thread? It's a big plane-shaped object, size compared to around twenty modern-day skyscrapers. It was filled with colors, most preferably brown-dark, With some signs of Earth's "Flag". It could handle over a hundred thousand people at once...
Rain felt the vibrations through her gloves.
…
How did I get here? Supposed to explore a galaxy fractured beyond human comprehension?
To answer that… we must go back. Billions of years back.
Fourteen billion years ago, there was nothing. No time. No space. No life. Then a bang. The universe burst into existence, expanding faster than imagination, scattering stars, colors, and chemistry across the void.
Over four billion years ago, Earth formed. A massive collision with a wandering planet, Theia, crashed into earth, forming the Moon. Life began in the oceans, just some tiny bacteria. Over eons, evolution wove complexity into existence. Humans appeared, becoming the inheritors of this planet.
Seven thousand years ago, in 1957 – nine hundred thirty-seven years before the Space Era, humanity sent its first satellite into the sky. Sputnik I, a tiny metal piece, gave flame to the "Space Race" at that time. Twelve years later, Americans walked on the Moon, leaving footprints and their flag on the lunar soil.
Then came 2025. A year that would redefine everything. The newly founded Solar Scientists have learned to manipulate wormholes and control negative energy. Founded by a newly formed group of nations, the scientists wanted to explore and control the universe. In a controlled test, a simple piece of metal vanished in New York and reappeared across the world in Tokyo. "The Astral Thread Project" was born.
Humans have made astonishing achievements by terraforming Mars, colonizing moons, and even sending humans to orbit other planets for the next 50 years, all by using this new "wormhole control" method.
But the ambition of humankind is weird, you see. World War Three erupted in 2101 due to the trade war between China and United States. The war was brutal, with all forces using nuclear warfare to destroy each other, causing radiation and atomic winter. Radiation poisoned the oceans and land. Civilization collapsed. The Apocalyptic Era began in the year 2103, 2 years after the beginning of the Third World War – marking its ending.
The Astral Thread barely survived. Its outer shells lay broken, but deep in the ruins of Warsaw, Poland (what would become North Irca), the Thread Core stayed untouched.
After several hundred years of the Earth's surface being engulfed in radiation, it was safe again. Major cities and nations have fully collapsed in the time humans were underground. Humans across the world have barely survived underground, living like rats. They've rebuilt their cities, and created new nations. Their new goal was to reach the stars beyond the Solar System as quickly as possible to prevent human extinction.
Thankfully, due to humanity's preservation skills, and help from the now-advanced humans on Mars, Titan, and Europa, who left Earth before the devastating war, Earth came back to its flourishing state. In the year 2894 – two hundred years since humans came back from the underground, and nearly 800 years since the end of the war, they started the First Space Era.
Eighteen years later, archeologists re-discovered the Thread Core in the ruins of Warsaw. They dug it out and sent it to the Solar Scientists (The best scientists of the Solar System, now located on Mars after the war). They resumed the "Astral Thread Project."
During the long research, humans have inhabited the Milky Way galaxy and contacted hundreds of alien species.