Chapter 1

Political life in the 2030s was interesting to say the least. The revelation of the Achilles Documents had sent the greater portion of humanity into a revolt against elected officials. Skimming off the top had devolved into skimming the entire calf. Trillions of dollars had been stolen from the taxpayers, from banks, and from communities, all going into the hands of a few. As unemployment rose from artificial intelligence and the standard of living declined worldwide, the working people of the world had become ready to fight back.

Some attempted regime change peacefully. Many did not. Numerous elected officials were assailed by angry mobs, and sympathetic police often turned a blind eye. And it was in this climate that the rich and powerful, many of whom were named in the documents, began to look for a new narrative through which they could maintain control.

With its influence over editorial control at major news networks, a certain family at the center of these crimes began the historic push for interplanetary space travel. Suddenly, old ideas for interstellar craft from the 1950s were front page news. And it wasn’t long before NASA, the ESA, and the CNSA began to collaborate as a single body known as ‘United Earth Space Command’. The $2 trillion dollar price tag for the Atlantis was shared among the nations, and certainly not from all of the money that had been stolen.

The ship was constructed primarily in space by specially made robots and spacewalking astronauts. Its five mile wide rotating disc (dubbed the ‘saucer section’ by its Star Trek fanboy engineers) generated artificial gravity at a force comparable to Earth’s, and it remains the single largest structure ever built. A nuclear fission drive propelled the craft forward, using the same technology that split the atom. On board the saucer section, there was soil, crops, animals, and enough water to maintain a large city. And in the reactor room, a mechanism to create more water if necessary existed, using oxygen supplied from the ship's plants and algae with the reactor room's supply of hydrogen. The projected top speed of the ship was 5% the speed of light. It could reach the nearest stars in a single human lifetime.

The front of the ship was outfitted with state of the art lasers, which were provided by the United States Navy. The lasers could quickly melt micrometeorites up to a diameter of three inches, and dedicated AI systems would continuously scan and fire the lasers as necessary. Moreover, the Atlantis benefited from atomically precise manufacturing. It was projected that at top speed, an area of the three inch titanium alloy could survive several hits from smaller micrometeorites before structural integrity became a concern.

The crew was selected from ethnically and geographically diverse regions, although functionally, the ‘founder nations’ had disproportionate representation. 12% of the 1152 crew members were American, 10% were Chinese, and 8% were from Europe. These were technical professionals that would maintain the Atlantis in space and educate new generations on how to do so. The remainder of the roster were non-engineering crewmen. These were the people who would make food, grow crops, have families, and give the ship a culture.

Who would be the Captain of the ship was the subject of intense debate. The nation-states, at that time, believed having the Captain meant their nation was at the forefront of this endeavor. The United States threatened to embargo China over the matter, and China threatened to seize American businesses in China for the state. This created a crisis that made its way into the news.

Ultimately, the matter was resolved when James McAllister, the American favorite for Captain, said on CNN, “If it’s going to stop the ship from launching, I don’t want to be Captain. The launch is more important than our national ego.” This, along with a resurgence murmur about the Achilles Documents, pressured the politicians to consider a compromise. In exchange for better import terms with China, the United States agreed to accept Xiu Ling as Captain

The Chief Engineer of the ship was a man named Wilson Higgs, an Caltech graduate and the go-to guy at UESC for difficult challenges. None of his superiors wanted to spend their lives traveling toward a distant star, but Higgs had been waiting to travel the stars his entire life. After only two days of begging his wife Serena, she agreed to accompany him along with their five-year-old daughter Lexy. But before he left, he and his lifelong best friend and coworker Samuel Bernstein reminisced one last time. Bernstein had designed the electronic systems for the ship’s nuclear reactor. At a bar in Huntsville, Alabama, Higgs jokingly said, “My life is in your hands, Sam!”

“Yeah, Wil. You’re gonna be alright up there.” The sentence hung in the air for a moment as 2010s rock played in the background. Higgs noted that Sam seemed almost sad, which was uncharacteristic of him. Higgs assumed it was just because he was leaving forever. Sam took a long drink from his hurricane, and continued, saying, “It’s all going to work out, Wil, and you’re going to be fine. Maybe one day, we’ll both be old and gray and you’ll message me from Wolf 359.”

Higgs didn’t really like to think about how he would die before getting to Wolf 359, so he didn’t address it. “Of course we’re going to be fine Sam! We’ve got APM. We’ve got the deadliest laser ever created. And we can patch the hull if it ever gets that far!”

“Yeah.” Sam responded. The next day, Wilson Higgs and his family boarded the first arrival rocket from Earth, along with James McAllister, Xiu Ling, ship nuclear physicist Larry Schwartz, Transportation Manager Jacques Dubois, their families, and ten other specialists.

As the UESC Space Shuttle Endeavor approached the Atlantis, Lexy looked out the glass. She’d heard her father say ‘five mile wide saucer section’ numerous times in the past couple of years, but the words didn’t do the scale justice. The Atlantis was so much bigger than the space shuttle she was in, which itself was huge. The front of the hull was shaped a bit like a rounded ice cream cone, and the saucer section was its ice cream. She beheld humanity’s greatest achievement with all the awe you’d expect a five-year-old to behold it with. James McAllister was watching her, and he said, “Are you ready, Lexy? Your mom likes Star Trek. We’re about to do it for real.”

Lexy looked back at him. “I’m ready, Jim. Do we get phasers? Is that a thing?”

They disembarked into the Atlantis’ Receiving Room, the zero-gravity docking bay on the starboard side of the hull. The Receiving Room itself was vast and, for the moment, had only a steel floor and walls. Its open air design was a relic of previous plans to allow the Atlantis to harvest resources from space if necessary. While the Atlantis had been supplied with enough Thorium to start and stop the vessel some fifteen times, high-level UESC engineers had concerns about frequent stops for resource harvesting becoming a habit of future crews and wasting resources.

Nothing truly prepares a person for weightlessness, but there was an electronic zip-line-like rail to safely transport crew members from the Receiving Room into the Atlantis’ saucer section. Each disembarking person grabbed the rail, pressed the button on it, and it immediately propelled them toward the ship’s saucer section. Wilson Higgs was originally going to carry Lexy across, but after watching the others do it, Lexy insisted on making the trip herself. Serena did not entirely approve of her daughter doing this alone, but after mulling it over, Higgs put Lexy on the zip-line, pressed the button, and she landed in the artificial gravity as if she’d been riding zip-lines her whole life.

It took two full years for the entire planned crew to board the vessel. Marathon launches happened from multiple launch sites in various nations. By the time they were done, the media cycle had already moved on to celebrity gossip. With shockingly little fanfare, the USS Atlantis began its journey into the depths of space. Its final destination was K2-18, a distant star with an exoplanet that had strong prospects for extraterrestrial life. But before they arrived there, they would map the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud and pass through the Wolf 359 system to give humanity its first up-close look at a red dwarf star.

The Atlantis crew was not naive. They knew the ship had been created for reasons not entirely devoted to the advancement of humanity, but they had resolved to make the best of it. Ling, McAllister, Higgs, and several other crew members addressed a group of students from Charleston, SC as they passed by Mars. They were in the ship’s Briefing Room in front of a long white rectangular table with round corners. The students could see a large LCD monitor behind them which displayed views from the ship’s external monitors. There were rolling office chairs for sitting, but the Atlantis crew members were standing together in front of the table so the students could see them.

“McAllister, you’re my idol! I just think it’s really cool that you guys are going to travel the stars! We all want to be astronauts, too!” A little boy with freckles and thick-rimmed glasses shouted into his teacher’s cell phone as the broadcast projected onto the class’ whiteboard.

McAllister and Ling both smiled, and for the first time, they felt that maybe the reason the ship was built didn’t matter. McAllister asked the young man, “What’s your name, son?”

“Sammy Smith.” he said. Sammy knew McAllister well from American media reports on the Atlantis, but seeing him here, up close and talking to him directly, was the coolest experience of his life. McAllister’s brown hair had a slightly grown-out crew cut, and faint dark circles under his hazel eyes. He, like everyone else on the screen, was in UESC uniform, which was beige khakis and a white polo shirt with the UESC logo, which, on these shirts, was depicted as a black outline of the planet Earth in the base of a rocket at a 45 degree angle. He noted that Captain Ling’s shirt had eagle’s wings above the UESC logo, indicating her status.

“Well, when we get an up close photo of Pluto in several weeks, I’ll call you back, Sammy. I think it’s still a planet! We may have to prove that with science.” McAllister shouted with hardly concealed amusement.

“It’s not actually a planet, though.” Ling countered. Her flowing black hair shifted to the left as she looked at McAllister quizzically.

McAllister held back a snicker and raised his eyebrows toward her once, as if to say, “I’m joking, Ling.”

“Oh. Yes.” Ling responded. She’d been trying to learn more English to communicate with the former NASA employees involved with this venture, but she wasn’t fluent yet. The fact that McAllister was joking had eluded her. Upon realizing this, she followed up by saying, “We will investigate that!”

The classroom chuckled. And so the Atlantis continued its journey, treading further and further into the solar system’s depths.