Hi.
By day, No Webpage For You. By night, aspiring author. Transplanted RedSox fan. Katong Laksa convert. Sticking out like a sore thumb in Southeast Asia.
By day, No Webpage For You. By night, aspiring author. Transplanted RedSox fan. Katong Laksa convert. Sticking out like a sore thumb in Southeast Asia.
Near space. Our space. Right here in our backyard, just past the orbit of Jupiter. It was big, it was flashy and you could see it from Earth just fine. It popped into being one day, electric against the black emptiness of space, fizzing and sparking; a spinning riot of color and energy broadcasting on every wavelength we could detect and a few we discovered shortly after.
Like an oil-painted Elvis on a black velvet canvas with sequins made of chaos and radiation, it dominated the night sky on Earth, brighter than the Milky Way, sometimes brighter than the moon.
No one knew what it was. The entire contingent of earth’s scientists pointed everything they had at it. We collected exabytes of data, poured over graphs and numbers, conducted investigations. We tracked it and scanned it and analysed it and we still didn’t know what it was.
But we knew what it looked like. It looked like a door.
#action #science-fiction #space-opera #secret-agents #ex-assassins
#ensemble-cast #firefly-esque #guardians-of-the-galaxy-esque
Dee - put character descriptions here... find a solution for the 100%width problem, make new banner
"Well, it's not the weirdest thing she's ever done."
Dee's Mom
"Meow."
Nemo
In 2025 something happened out in space. Near space. Our space. Right here in our backyard, just past the orbit of Jupiter. It was big, it was flashy and you could see it from earth just fine. It popped into being one day, electric against the beyond-black emptiness of space, fizzing and sparking; a spinning riot of color and energy broadcasting on every wavelength we could detect and a few we discovered shortly after.
Like an oil-painted Elvis on a black velvet canvas with extra sequins made of chaos and radiation, it dominated the night sky, brighter than the Milky Way, sometimes brighter than the moon.
No one knew what it was. The entire contingent of earth’s scientists pointed everything they had at it. We collected exabytes of data, poured over graphs and numbers, conducted investigations. We tracked it and scanned it and analysed it and we still didn’t know what it was.
But we knew what it looked like. It looked like a door.
And that’s how it stayed for a while. Amateurs rallied to the cause and telescopes popped up on roofs and hilltops from LA to Mumbai. Sky-gazing and armchair Anomaly Analysis became the new number one cooler-talk topic and photos of the phenomena in every wavelength became almost as popular on social media as cats. Pictures drawn by schoolchildren were posted to refrigerators planet-wide and in response to demand Crayola released an all-new box of crayons, 418 of them, one for each detected shade of color within what we were calling ‘The Anomaly.’ ‘Anomaly Blue’ was Pantone’s Color of the Year in 2028.
A year or so passed. And then one night, one of the 8.1 billion pairs of eyes that looked up at the sky in wonder checked their readings and discovered something. The big, shiny, door in space, out past the orbit of Jupiter, was slowly opening.
Many a scholarly treatise has been written about the effect of that discovery on the people and civilizations of earth. Many continue to be written. But if you wanted to sum it all up in the lingua franca of the past, on the day that the news went out, Earth, collectively, had a big, fat, cow.
And something changed. Cold wars cooled further and evaporated as combatant’s attention was drawn space-ward. Dogma-based terrorism declined as wizened elders pulled their beards in existential agony, scrambling to incorporate this new evidence into their belief-systems. Raw terror made people empathic. The Us vs.Them mentality, perhaps humanity’s greatest flaw, suddenly became our greatest virtue. ‘Us’ now included all of earth’s peoples, not just tiny fractions of one color or region or religion. ‘Them’ focused our effort, cutting out extraneous distractions like hair-splitting cultural differences and inconsequential little border squabbles and other petty conflicts that no longer seemed to matter. In the teeth of the single most overwhelming threat that humanity had ever faced, solidarity won out. Against all expectations, in defiance of everything we thought we knew about human nature, we all came together as one people, working towards a common goal.
And we created something wonderful.
A guardian, a protector, the best and brightest of all of earth’s peoples came together in unswerving purpose for the collective good of all. We built AEGIS, named after the goddess Athena’s golden-scaled shield. It was a defense, it was an institution, it was a fleet of ships, it was our first colony in space, excavated from the rocky surface of Pallas, an eccentric little planetesimal in the asteroid belt, beyond the orbit of Mars; near enough to keep an eye on The Anomaly, within striking distance when the time came.
We sent our best scientists up there, our best engineers, our best negotiators, our brightest thinkers, our most empathic councillors, our fiercest warriors. Together they formed our brightest hope for the defense of our suddenly precious little blue orb—scrappy, self-sufficient, ready to take on all comers for the preservation of our home.
We stood together, proudly. Let the invaders come, we said as a people, we are ready.
There was just one problem.
The invasion never happened. The Anomaly went right on being big and noisy and attention-grabbing and it never did anything else. The door was open. Nothing came through.
Now it’s 2325 and the big, showy hole in the sky is still there. Transmitting on all frequencies out beyond the orbit of Jupiter, it’s just as loud and beautiful and threatening as it was on the day that it first showed up. But, now, we’ve gotten used to it. Like an oyster grows a layer of nacre over a speck of sandy irritant, our collective consciousness had created a pearl of complacency where once we had feared for the very soul of our species’ existence.
Meanwhile, the scrambling of resources to build the station and the tech and the ships of AEGIS had changed the world economy. We had learned how to harness the bounty of earth in ways that were newly efficient for producing colossal projects we would never have dared before. The work opened up our consciousness and made our horizons bigger. Suddenly space exploration, space colonization, was doable and why not? Aren’t you sick of your neighbors here on earth with their goddamn dog that barks all night and their stupid leaf-blower and their parties with terrible music at 2am on a work-day? Now, we said, collectively, we can build our own exclusive neighbourhoods with just the right kind of people, out there in space, where there’s plenty of room. And then, finally, we can all get a good night’s sleep for a change.
Our planet-wide altruism collapsed back in on itself with a loud, sucking pop that was heard around the world. But even so we still kept the same drive, the same scrappy, defiant stubbornness that we had harnessed to build AEGIS in the first place.
Suddenly corporations, instead of funnelling their profits into tax hedges for their CEOs, poured their wealth into space instead. Private institutions, like the Girl Scouts and Mensa, of all people, colonized asteroids, built space stations. Several enterprising cities tacked on a ‘New’ in front of their names and launched space stations into orbits that could now be patented—New Singapore, New Chicago, New Tokyo, New Dongguan, New New Delhi, and more. We left our home-world in waves, like the tufted seeds of dandelions blown outward on a summer breeze. We flew head-first into our new role as a space-going people, our home much bigger now, much wider, much stranger, more precarious perhaps, and certainly more diverse.
Over the course of three hundred years you might have expected AEGIS to shrivel like a vestigial limb, unneeded, its purpose never met, but that is not what happened. Their mission evolved instead, mutated, changed. They were still our shining protectors but now instead of holding fast against an alien threat that failed to materialise, they became the shield that protected us from ourselves. Some called it a nanny state and fought against it for the privilege of continuing to kill their neighbors in tawdry little in-fights as they saw fit, the common good be damned. Some, those that had established private corporately-owned colonies, were of the opinion that they were not subject to the laws of an authority they did not recognize and went their own ways, for better and for worse. But most of the rest of us accepted AEGIS as a sort of peace-keeping body, a general think-tank and source of innovation in both science and technology. Their agents went out into the system to broker deals, negotiate treaties, make trades, put down disputes, and smooth the steady grind of humanity’s forward progress.
The black and gold of AEGIS uniforms became a familiar presence in the scattered habitations of our newly expanded neighborhood, the solar system, SolSys. Amongst colonies and space stations, settled asteroids, long-haul freighters, nomadic cruisers and the other strange and wonderful creations of humanity’s new estate, blossoming now free from the bonds of gravity, AEGIS was a united institution, our best. They did their duty and kept the peace.
For a while.
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