The Arrival
2200 CE | 0 PA (Post-Arrival)
"Through struggle, to the stars. Struggled we have. Now, to the stars we go."
-Mission Commander Vola Aldir
Much can be made of the Departure. For the inhabitants of Earth, it was the heralded realisation of a dream. A dream so long held and indulged in the hearts and minds of humanity, to yearn after it was almost to yearn after home itself. A new home. On a new world. And then, to toil and
strive until this grand vision bore fruit. Little wonder then that, when the engines of that great spaceship ignited, propelling its occupants inexorably to this latter-day promised land, even on Earth it seemed the genesis of a new era.
But to those aboard the Ad Astra, that mattered little. For they were the ones who departed, leaving that old Earth behind, and with it the eras it counted. The slate wiped clean, only one epoch mattered now. The day they awoke from their biostatic slumber, their ship in orbit around this world anew. The Arrival.
New Moon
0 PA - 20 PA
"Sometimes, it is to a dream one awakes."
-O. Tarcis, The Enypneion
Novaluna. The New Moon. With the familiar Selenic orb of old Earth now light-years distant, so abandoned were any concerns of confusion. It seemed only sensible that this new world, a natural satellite of the gas planet Navacasha in the star system Neoilius, be given a sobriquet of its own. One that captured its magic and mystery. Yet this world bore no barren moonscape on its surface. No, this Novaluna teemed with a vibrancy nigh delirious, like the psychedelic fever
dreams of the moonstruck and lunatic. Studied from a distance it had long been, probes and robots sending back reams of data for scientists to pore over, enraptured in fascination.
Yet they could not conceive of the wonder to be felt by the fortunate few who touched upon the surface.
Only then, when amidst it all, did the settlers grasp at last how truly this world, Novaluna, was new. In its life and landscape, uncanny in its familiarity, eerie in its foreignness, and breathtakingly beautiful in its every aspect. It struck them then that humans might be ill at home on this rare treasure of the cosmos. Yet to leave it an enigma would have been anathema. Ignorance could not be abetted, for to know was all. Humanity's greatest undertaking of knowledge would have to be embarked upon with great care for this untouched world, yet embarked upon it had to be.
Thus commenced the settlement of Novaluna. First upon the surface were the four security installations, Extrasolar Colony Locations (XCLs) I through IV; for while the environment of Novaluna was incredible beyond words, so also was it dangerous. Whatever the colonists' wishes to preserve the sanctity of Novaluna's ecology, as a species virtually endangered upon this moon, humans could afford no casualties as they struggled for survival. A hard edge was necessary to ensure their safety, and necessary for them to establish their first true foothold on Novaluna.
Habitation Facility, designation: XCL-V. The Exclave. Not a military base. Not a research outpost. A city. A sanctuary. A home. Novaluna One Mission Control (N1MC), up until that point the body in charge of commanding the Ad Astra's spaceflight and the colonisation process, repurposed itself as Novaluna's coordinating authority and made the Exclave its capital. Upon signing into effect the First Mission Charter, the founding constitution at its heart, it ordained the Exclave and Novaluna the second edifice of humanity. One where it might belong, thrive even, and perhaps one day come to share this new world with the rest of its inhabitants, as one.
Perhaps.
Sprout and Flourish
20 PA - 50 PA
"I survived as I must. Should I not therefore be able to live as I wish?"
-Nas Biurec, The People's Home
The founding of the Exclave marked not just humanity's first firm foothold on Novaluna, but the seeding of a nascent sense of belonging. Here was a place where a new generation of humanity, so far from the birthplace of their species, could be
brought into the world and feel truly as if they were meant to be. But first, of course, those new generations had to come about in the first place. And that was anticipated to be problematic.
With every kilogram commanding a hefty premium aboard the Ad Astra, little room had been available for toting along makers of home and family. Amidst the rather roots-averse scientists, soldiers, administrators, and technicians who volunteered, there was little appetite for reproducing at a rate fast enough even to replace the population, much less to expand humanity's remit at the desired pace. Thus created in anticipation of this had been the Zygotic Reserve Program. Millions of synthetic zygotes, frozen and packed en-masse aboard the starship as the first cohort of human beings never to know Earth. Planetside, they were the source of more controversy than any other aspect of the Novaluna One mission. But the opinions and biases of old Earth were left far behind with it. Novaluna was a world for visionaries. A world for something new.
Genetically engineered to best face the challenges posed by their new home, these Zygotic Reservists, known colloquially as Synths, were to know a new way of life, from birth onward. The next chapter in human development. Their heritage, humanity. Their premise, science. Their future, their own.
The continued survival of the human species on Novaluna secured, thereafter came the task of extending its reach. With so much to offer in knowledge and resources, Novaluna could hardly be fully appreciated from the vantage of four military bases and a single insular city. With industry just beginning to blossom upon this most novel of frontiers, so arrived the opportunity to expand across the moon. Colonies hybridising specific requisite roles with general habitation sprouted across the world, from scientific outposts to commercial establishments to cultural hubs. Even with the ecological light-touch approach learned after a hair-raising few decades staring down the prospect of environmental collapse back on Earth, humanity was making this world its own.
A Home and a Horizon
50 PA - 120 PA
"Upon a new day, a new light."
-Shalu Su Pailo, "The Sine", Soil of Life
Then, in those heady times, it could hardly have been construed elsewise. The mission, Novaluna One, had been a resounding success. In fifty years, two-thousand remarkable individuals of Earth, accompanied by the technology and progeny of humankind, had hybridised this beautiful moon into a place where life of two worlds,
formerly so distant in every conception, could flourish as one, in peace and harmony. With the hard years of breathless toil now behind them, the new human inhabitants of Novaluna could at last focus on living the ordinary, daily lives they craved, freed of the overarching urgency of ensuring mission stability. For now the mission had moved to its latter stage, one set never to end; live and develop as humans shall, ideally and freely.
In the seventy solar years thenceforth, they did. By the time the one-hundred-and-twentieth anniversary of the Arrival elapsed with all the attendant celebration, twenty-six permanent colonies had been founded in total. The Exclave grew into a bustling metropolis of bright lights and tall spires, brimming with a population of nearly a million souls. The other colonies, though not as large and still dedicated to their primary functions, swelled to become cities in their own right. And no longer did they teem only with the single-minded scientists, soldiers, administrators, and technicians that founded them. They had become communities in and of themselves, filled just as well with artists and entrepreneurs and every manner of ordinary person simply seeking a happy and fulfilling life, even as others continued to pursue the grand, overarching vision of Novaluna One.
Of course, not even this freshest of starts could protect humanity from its own faults. Sooner or later, the hard realities of existence became too great to ignore.
Stirrings First
124 PA
"We too have our hallowed ground. Tread upon it carefully."
-Dervin Cutenan, excerpt from PA 124 Campaign Speech no. 5.
In some ways, it was perhaps inevitable that, amidst the idealism that characterized the people and institutions of Novaluna, a hubris would take
root. In their naïveté believing themselves to be a society above and beyond the controversies, conflicts, and calamities of the planet they left behind, the people of Novaluna doubtlessly set themselves up for precipitous failure. Though catastrophe was still yet to come for many years, the first ructions signaling an end to those peaceful halcyon days of yore were nigh.
It began with the Zygotic Reserve Program. Having been a major cornerstone of the mission's success in producing a global civilisation of diverse individuals, it was for the first time scheduled for a minor paring back of the breakneck population growth it had sustained since its inception, as part of what was at the time meant to be a routine reorganization. Until scandal surfaced and crisis broke. Though incorporation of bioengineering into the ZRP and the children it begat, typically for reasons of basic health and quality of life on Novaluna, was long-established and largely uncontroversial, it emerged that the ZRP's administrators were planning on a massive under-the-table expansion of this protocol, unchecked by civil society or the body politic.
Within days of the news emerging, several top officials at ZRCA (Zygotic Reserve Commissionary Authority), the ZRP's governing body, resigned, in turn triggering an administrative crisis that saw politicians, bureaucrats, and other edifices of power threaten to take control of the ZRP in defiance of its constitutional independence. The stakes involved exposed deep faultlines in Novalunar society that had been growing for some time, and for the first time Novaluna saw a groundswell of ill-tempered, populist politics. Although deft diplomacy by N1MC eventually brought the Reservist scandal to heel and began the process of rebuilding confidence in the system, the incident shattered the illusion that Novaluna was truly above the perennial sins of its forebears.
Promise and Peril
151 PA - 190 PA
"It seems the Universe still holds some surprises for us. And us, in turn, for it."
-Dr. Tiuru Mithra, Psionics: The New Revolution
It began, perhaps rather prosaically, with a perfectly routine research expedition, of the sort that had been
the workaday bread and butter of Novalunar exploration since humanity first set foot on its surface. Piqued by the presence of inexplicably warm micro-gyres and resultant density and diversity of sea life along reefs off the coast of the far-southern island of Tranquility, scientists cataloguing the local marine biota stumbled upon a strange discovery, that this unique environment was, no less, the product of an unassuming algae-like organism inhabiting these littoral havens. For it had evolved to make use of a facet of the universe hereunto entirely unknown to humanity; psionics.
Research began, then accelerated rapidly in earnest, for as more and more insight was gained into this bizarre and wonderful substratum of the fabric of reality, closer and closer grew the prospect of humanity making use of this once unknown yet clearly incredible phenomenon. Even cautious realists could not deny the sheer potential inherent in this new discovery. Without a doubt, technology built upon this new frontier of science would, like fire from the gods, hand to humanity the power to ply and manipulate the inner workings of the universe as never before. So utilized, psionics promised to elevate humanity to an echelon only until then dreamt of.
Were it not for the indelibly tragic nature of its wielders, at least.
Tamper
190 PA
"But then on... so too a new night."
-Shalu Su Pailo, "The Sine", Soil of Life
Ambition was nothing to excoriate. Without it, Novaluna One would have remained but the slightest shadow of an idealistic dream, and not the sole reality lived and breathed by millions their every present moment. Even to restrain it would be to stuff a bird of beautiful plumage
and heart-rending song into a dark and rusty cage. It was to be embraced wholeheartedly as the rightful creator of new worlds entire. But where it met ignorance and conflict, so too could it destroy. For upon Novaluna, two incipient revolutions had begun.
The first was of technology, inhabiting its newest realm of psionics. What began as a cursory examination of a strange and scarce microorganism's enzymatic activity had evolved into a far-reaching discipline as sweeping in its implications as its scope across science. Decades of intensifying research had brought it to the cusp of functional realisation, poised to upend nearly all else that came before it. The tantalising prospects of its myriad possibilities could almost exonerate the lengths striven and depths plumbed to further its cause. Almost.
The second was political, and thus by necessity a sordid affair, and furthermore a testament to one sad axiom of human nature; never shall it know an idle peace. With the Novalunars' great, concerted struggle for survival and success now over, internal division rushed in to fill the void. For a century and a half its worst effects were held at bay, but no longer. From the protean flux of prior times emerged two ideologies so diametrically antithetical to one another, no common principle was sacred enough not to fall fodder to their enmity. Now, with the emergence of psionics portending an upheaval across all humankind, the stakes were raised higher than ever.
A mountain of fuel, now only for want of that inevitable spark.
To War Within
201 PA - 204 PA
"For where life may wallow,
strife will follow."
-Shalu Su Pailo, "The Sine", Soil of Life
The Luminarists spoke of a grand vision of perfection and utopia, of humanity brought together under the enlightened tutelage and coordination of a system borne upon the power of psionics, its faults excised from existence. The Volitionists dreamt of a world elevated by the
wielding of every person the ability to make their will manifest, the notion of limitations made obsolete. So glowingly they both could wax on the futures they were sure usher in. And so savagely they could battle for primacy. First with words, in the fora of civil society. Later with influence, in the edifices of power. And last with bullets, when the schism rending Novaluna asunder grew too great to mend.
The ensuing civil war was not the first violence between humans seen by the colonists, but on every metric of magnitude it was the greatest. On old Earth, the conflict may have only been classified as "low-intensity", fought on the streets and in the shadows, through skirmishes and sabotage. But on Novaluna, it was the first real war anyone present had ever known, encompassing every colony in its breadth and catching many in the crossfire. As the armed forces proper of XCLs I - IV stood off in a hair-trigger stalemate, mercenaries, guerrillas, militias, and irregulars traded munitions like merchants of death. Herein as well did psionics prove to be decisive, yet not in heralding a golden age of humanity. Its first functional application, developed and wielded by both sides were the living superweapons it proved capable of creating.
At the war's terminus, the Volitionists emerged with a bitter and pyrrhic victory. Relatively little blood had been spilt. Few communities were outright destroyed. Yet the collective trauma it instilled ran deep. Promises of reparations and even repentance by the victors offered perhaps a glimmer of hope, but the scars the war left would take a long time to heal.
Watered with Blood
204 PA - 229 PA
"...the seeds of fear and hate take root."
-Dr. Cartia Tes Morem
And fester, those wounds did indeed. As the civil war's winners rebuilt civilisation atop a mountain of callous policies and broken promises, the vanquished and disgruntled took to the shadows, a low flame that kept the deep divide simmering. In the wake of the first great
conflict, those who found no home amidst the damaged society with which they had been left instead took it upon themselves to continue the fight to remake the world... through whatever means necessary. Thence was born the phenomenon of Anti-Missionism, an ideology that rejected as illegitimate all that had been built beneath the aegis of Novaluna One.
The ranks of violent non-state actors swelled with the cast-out and bitter, a surge that saw a motley collection of guerrilla groups, para-militias, and terrorist organisations, born in the fires of the war just prior and sprinkled like ashfall across the world, grow in size, radicalism, and lethal capability with gut-churning rapidity. The end of one war served only to usher in another, and this one was to be altogether more horrifying, for no longer was it a matter of peers dueling over ideology. These Postbellum Conflicts were a slow-burning war of bloody attrition, the roots of which stretched wide and deep and through places nobody could have expected.
For two and a half decades, this dalliance in the shade was low-key enough to be a status quo with which people could just about content themselves, opposite an enemy they could fight but not fear. Yet in the 229th year after the Arrival, one springtime midmorning, that state of affairs inextricably changed. Perpetrated by the New Sanctuary group of Anti-Missionist militant extremists, a coordinated campaign of indiscriminate violence and bloodshed in the Exclave's vibrant port district violently claimed the lives of nearly 8000 civilians, a day of horror never before seen. The silent moratorium had been broken at last.
When Set Alight
229 PA - 249 PA
"...it burns us all to ash."
-Chief Legislator Sejiste "Sejis" Arran
25 years since the formal end of the civil war, and the gash that it had left was torn wide open once more. As the body politic demanded blood-for-blood revenge, the world geared up for full-scale conflict once more, this time in a
campaign of extermination against not only the culprits of the attacks, but all who dare associate with the Anti-Missionist movement. The Postbellum Conflicts mutated into the fully-fledged Mission War, to be waged across both the great wilds of Novaluna and within the closest warrens of its civilisation as no prior conflict had ever been, as step by step the enemy perceived was rooted out of its every den as one might a pest infestation. Yet with every passing year, their numbers dwindled not, for their brutal prosecution became a rallying cry anew.
All the while, in the wreckage and rubble of those toppled towers, it seemed as if the dream that had propelled humanity across those many trillions of kilometers of space and into the great beyond, that had kindled a new flame upon a new world entire, had after many years of dwindling been snuffed out at last. In those ashes, an old epoch died, and from them a new one was reborn, one that knew only a history of failed promises and the death left in their wake. The generation that emerged from those years of tragedy and their catastrophic cumulation lost that light, and some among them would pursue new dreams in its place. Desperate, radical dreams in the hopes of revising the tragic living history of humanity once and for all.
Great works, indeed veritable latter-day magna opera for a civilization amidst the stars, that had been set in motion decades prior took on a new urgency. To their believers, they would harness the forces that had torn Novaluna asunder to unite it once more; psionic technology, designed to grasp at and mold the very fabric of the human condition. As they saw it, there were no leaders, no groups, no beliefs, no humans to whom such awesome powers could belong, no humans who could use them responsibly. Something else, someone else was needed. So began the clandestine Ilu Project, a pursuit to build in secret a benevolent, psionically-empowered artificial intelligence to mend and guide a fractured humanity. A living god to transcend its creators.
The City Dark
249 PA - 253 PA
"We do not countenance defeat,
not in serving our people."
-Chief Executive Rila Halicom
This was not simply another grand aspiration, once more virtuous in its ambitious vision of progress for humanity, yet once more falling victim to its own hubris. For by its very nature,
the Ilu Project presumed not to know best. No, its premise was far greater and more terrifying, for it was to abnegate itself and all others of that ability entirely, completely and forever. There was no telling how such a being would choose to govern its mortal charges, only that its nature must be so perfect that its will could be nothing but right. A true leap of faith into the vast unknown. Yet beside its core existence there was always be a companion human exemplar, lest it forget its duty to its creators.
A human voice, a human vision, a human mind, born to the Ilu Project as its paragon, whose volition and agency were never to be smothered again. On behalf of this epitome of human choice, who bore the mandate of all free-willed sapience on Novaluna, one final war was waged. Fought deep in the shadows cast by the open conflicts raging around it, no less for the human soul of all Novaluna, this War of the Night brought the world to the brink of a turning point, a singularity even, from which there would be no return.
So it was. And yet, this war came and went entirely unseen. The story of the Ilu Project ended not with a great revelation or reckoning, but a simple vanishing back into the currents of history whence it arose. As for the deity it sought to birth, none but a quiet few knew of the ultimate nature of its coming, nor of its passing. Perhaps it never truly came to be, or perhaps it really was unleashed upon the world, only to judge humanity best and most capable in its absence, its fate truly unknown. Either way, it was a vindication of human will by then sorely needed. At last, perhaps, the wounds it was made to salve would heal.
Respite
253 PA - 400 PA
"As a society we may still be juvenile, but as humans we have endured and proven resilient through far worse."
-Dr. Visi Vi Sera
There was no denying the toll of mortal conflict, still fresh and likely to sting for many years to come. Yet the denizens of Novaluna were an optimistic lot, preferring more to hope for the future than lament the past. The ordinary citizens of Novaluna were content
with peace no matter what form it took, and were determined to make the most of it; rebuilding and reconstructing not only the physical infrastructure, but the social trust and cohesion destroyed during the wars as well would take time and effort, but at last provided the people of Novaluna with a common goal to strive towards once more.
Though it was a process ill at ease with Novalunar sensibilities of their own progress, the hubris born of misguided impressions of having created a post-conflict society gave way to a cautious, mature understanding that even the visionary world of Novaluna was not immune to the follies of humanity. It was with a sense of resignation that the Novalunars came to accept the fact that more and worse tragedies would follow in the future, and a sense of determination that they would weather them as they came and emerge stronger as a result.
In the meantime, the promise of psionics' peaceful revolution still loomed large. In pursuit of this, research and development reignited in earnest, now oriented towards improving life and society. Around it, innovation blossomed and commerce flourished, and as the technology's benevolent wave swept across the world, people embraced it wholeheartedly and celebrated the good it portended. Idealism had been rekindled on Novaluna.
That its abrupt and brutal end came at no knowing fault of their own is the greatest tragedy of all.
