It all started with those simple words. Humanity had reached the moon, something thought unreachable to that point. Over the decades that followed, technology sped along with leaps and bounds. Rules once thought immutable were bent and eventually broken between the indomitable will of mankind and the flow of time. Computers went from being the size of an entire building to desktop size, to a supercomputer in a watch. All these advances didn't slow mankind in the least; curiosity and the need for more drove them ever on.

On the hundredth anniversary of the first steps on the moon, mankind put the first person on Mars. They could have done it months earlier, but it was felt to be a suitable honor for those that had fallen, so the few could reach the nearest planet. Mars was just a stepping stone for the young species though, improvements in technology were coming around every few months. Ten years after the red planet was colonized, the first high speed sublight engines were successfully tested. In the grand scheme they weren't insanely fast, but it still allowed travel to speed through the solar system. What formerly took years was reduced to a span of mere hours.

In the decades that followed, mankind colonized everything from the heart of the system to the asteroid belt for mining, even placing small research outposts on the assortment of dwarf planets in the dark. For the longest time, there wasn't much progress on getting mankind past the glow of the Sol system. That changed one fateful day with a complete accident at a research station orbiting Jupiter.

You see, this exact station was experimenting with faster than light travel. Well, not true FTL but more of a cheat with artificial wormholes. No matter how people tried, true FTL was impossible with humanity's knowledge of the universe. So like anything that gets in the way of mankind, we adapted and went around. In this case, the Arroyo Corporation managed to be the first in history to create an artificial wormhole. It was just for a few microseconds, but the proof of concept was there. In the span of a few short decades, those microseconds turned into full seconds, then minutes, then effectively indefinitely provided there was enough power to sustain the jump gate. The downside was that it was a completely unguided wormhole which might exit anywhere.

The solution was to send a drone ship to build a gate on the other side of the wormhole. With that simple change, humanity spread to the stars as a gate system was established anywhere and everywhere. Some might call it providence, others would call it luck, but the Sol gateway was never moved from orbit around Jupiter. Instead, Jupiter became a hub for interstellar travel, repairs, and refining. This even lead to a revolution in government that ended with the creation of the United Terran Empire, which contained representatives of every human colony and mining station in the black, along with the green jewel of Earth.

As mankind grew among the stars, they found an abundance of curiosities, bountiful planets, and even natural beauty that put Earth to shame. Shessarin, with its beaches made of diamonds, or the glowing planet lovingly nicknamed "Bob," by an explorer with a strange sense of humor. He had joked that nobody had to live on Bob, but since the planet's beauty was due to massive clouds of radioactive vapor, well, to say it was a bad joke put it mildly. The thing that mankind had hoped to encounter was the one thing they never did find. Sapient life. There were worlds with the possibility of it, or even strange creatures with an animal level of intelligence, but no life to match our own.

Four hundred years passed with humanity seeding itself among the stars. Technology continued to advance at its rapid pace as well, to where jump gates were created more and more efficiently, yet were still the only feasible travel to other stars. Shipborne engines simply could come nowhere near the speeds needed to reach other solar systems on their own. Intra-system drives that could get up to .5c was the peak of drive technology, although rumors had it that the military had even faster ships.

Despite all the gained knowledge about the universe, how it worked, and the multitudes of worlds around us, there was one simple question that nobody had ever asked. Given everything known about science, the question was largely moot for everyone but our dear hero. You see, for Alex Rodriguez, that one impossible question that had never been asked redefined his life. What happens if a star were to drift in front of an active wormhole's path?

To put it simply, everything is the answer. Next Chapter: 02. The Peak of Man Estimated time remaining: 3 Hours, 50 Minutes