Chapter 1: Prologue: What They Are Telling Us

This is the history. We learn it at six years old, before we learn the names of the ships.

Long ago, Earth was humanity's cradle.

They show us pictures. Blue and white and turning, wrapped in weather, more water than land. They tell us there were forests that took a thousand years to grow and that nobody owned. They tell us a person could walk outside without asking permission, that the air was simply there, free, unmetered, unrationed, moving on its own.

A world of endless possibilities. That is the phrase in the book. I have read it four hundred times and I still do not know what it means, because I have never in my life stood anywhere that a possibility could come from.

In the year 3000, we learned how to open a planet.

The book is proud of this part. Deep-core tapping: a shaft driven down into the nuclear heart of the world, and out of it, power without end. No more scarcity. No more want. And the method was universal — any planet near any star would do. Humanity had found the key that fits every lock in the universe.

Our salvation became our curse.

They are careful with the next thousand years. The famine, the dying fields, the storms that came every season and then every month and then simply stayed. Cracked earth where there had been grain. Whole coastlines rewritten. The book says natural disasters became our daily reality, and it says this in the same flat voice it uses for shipping schedules, as if a millennium of collapse were a weather report.

It does not say that we were drinking the planet dry. It says the planet grew sick. There is a difference, and the difference is the part of the sentence where you would put the blame.

And then, out of the cracks in the dying world, they came.

The Engers.

Beings of pure hatred, the book says. Born from the Earth's own suffering — from our greed, our poison, our endless thirst. Nightmares in the shape of men, grey and gaunt and starved, with too many teeth and eyes like coals. They did not want land. They did not want tribute. They wanted us gone, and they were patient, and they were very good at it.

Three hundred years. That is how long we fought. Fifteen billion people in the year 3700, and by the year 4000 there were three billion left. Do the arithmetic they never make us do out loud: that is twelve billion names, and the book gives none of them.

So a decision was made.

With what remained of humanity's resources, CyberElectronics built twenty ark ships, each as vast as a city, each capable of carrying ten million souls. Only twenty. Construction took three centuries — three centuries with the enemy at the door — and when the last hull was sealed there was nothing left to build a twenty-first with.

Twenty ships. Ten million each. Two hundred million people.

Out of three billion.

They call it the Selection, and the book is proudest of this part, which is the part I cannot read without feeling something crawl. Health first: entire bloodlines opened and studied, generations of medical history laid out like ledgers, and any trace of hereditary illness disqualified the whole line. Ninety percent of what was left of humanity failed at that gate alone. Then endurance. Then the mind — fear, pressure, stress, applied until people broke, and the ones who did not break were written down.

The book says: only the strongest could carry humanity forward.

My mother says: your ancestors were chosen, and we earned our place here.

The ones who were not chosen stayed. They watched the ships light their engines from the ground. There are pictures of that too, and CyberElectronics has never explained why it kept them — crowds with their arms up, faces tipped to the sky, a woman holding a child over her head as if height were the same thing as hope. Please. I'm begging you. At least save my child.

Two hundred million left. Two point eight billion stayed.

And shortly after our Great Departure, we are told, an asteroid came out of the dark and struck the Earth and destroyed it completely. Planet, forests, oceans, cities, Engers, and everyone we left standing on the ground — all of it gone in an afternoon.

I have always thought that was a very tidy asteroid.

That is where the book exhales. That is where the music swells. The enemy is dead. The wound is closed. Nothing was abandoned, because there is nothing left to have abandoned, and no one is guilty, because a rock fell out of the sky and rocks are nobody's fault. Grieve if you must, but grieve a thing that no longer exists, and grieve it quietly, and be grateful.

That is at least what they are telling us.

In the year 8760, humanity clings to life on Antaria.

Twenty ships in a ring, linked hull to hull, turning slowly around a grey dwarf planet barely bigger than the moon that Earth once had. Down through that ring run the conduits — rivers of light pouring into the rock beneath us, drinking. The same key. Every lock in the universe.

We turn with the planet, so our day is fifteen hours long and our night is fifteen hours long, and a year is two hundred and ninety-two days, and the gravity is ten percent heavier than the world our bodies were built for. You feel it in the morning. You feel it every morning of your life.

The ships are numbered, and the numbers are the whole of our society. Ship 1 holds Zeus, who saved us, who is worshipped, who is renewed every ten years like a season. Below him the numbers count downward through comfort. Ships 7, 8 and 9 grow the food. And at the bottom, on the ships marked 10, the workers live and work and die so that everyone above them can be fed, and are given rations from above in return, and are told to be grateful, and mostly are.

I live on Ship 10.

My name is Eden.

And this is where our story begins.