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    The Osiris Invasion: Book Two of Seeds of a Fallen Empire
    The Osiris Invasion: Book Two of Seeds of a Fallen Empire
    The Osiris Invasion: Book Two of Seeds of a Fallen Empire
    Ebook395 pages5 hours

    The Osiris Invasion: Book Two of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

    By Anne Spackman

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    About this ebook

    In The Osiris Invasion, the Earth of the future is attacked by an alien force known as the Orians who come from the Orion Stars. The Earth has suffered a second Dark Ages in the 22nd and 23rd century and recovered enough that they are planning to send an exploration mission to alpha centauri.
    However, an alien starship crashes on Earth, pursued by another group of aliens called the Orians, and the Earth of the future must deal with this alien invasion...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnne Spackman
    Release dateFeb 15, 2012
    ISBN9781466132474
    The Osiris Invasion: Book Two of Seeds of a Fallen Empire
    Author

    Anne Spackman

    At the current time, I am a gymnastics coach and a writer of many types of fiction. I have a BA in English language and literature from the University of Chicago. I am half-American and half-Scottish. I spent many summers as a girl in Scotland, and moved to England at 16 where I finished high school at Bedford High School in Bedfordshire, England.My first novel, The Last Immortal, I wrote more than twenty years ago. It is the first of six novels in the "Seeds of a Fallen Empire" series that was finished in 2000 and finally published as an e-book in 2010-2014 after many years of trying the traditional publishing route. I have also written one fantasy novel, Curse of the Dragon Kings, which was written in 1997 and published as an e-book in 2010.As a writer, I started out writing mostly science fiction and also fantasy as I so much loved J.R.R. Tolkien as a girl. I also really enjoy historical fiction set in the days of ancient Rome, (and Egypt.) I am now writing more romantic and historical short stories.

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      The Osiris Invasion - Anne Spackman

      Prologue

      Like many unattainable things, the stars are most beautiful when seen from a distance. He had seen his share of them. There was never any end to the unchanging stars. No night, no day. No matter how far he traveled among them, his position seemed to be frozen in space. There was no escape.

      I would tell you, my love, of all my life, now that my journey is nearing its end. If only you were here.

      He was alone, or nearly. There was only one other passenger on board his spaceship Selesta.

      On and on the ship traveled. Stars ahead, stars behind, enveloping him. He felt hopelessly lost in the infinity, even though he knew where he was going. If he were human, he felt certain the stars would have driven him insane long ago.

      He was no longer human.

      He was Ornenkai, an immortal. His soul memory was stored in the computerized databank of an ancient spaceship, the Selesta. A spaceship that had seen the rise and fall of the greatest alien civilization ever to have developed. A civilization so advanced, that it had been able to store the memories of a human man in a machine—and so, he had become a computerized entity, trapped forever in Selesta. Selesta, a ship created from the ruins of an ancient Enorian flagship.

      If only I could be a human once again… The miracle he and the eternal Emperor Marankeil had waited for, that their computerized souls could be rechanneled back into an immortal human form after so many years of living as machines.

      He had lost hope of it ever happening, as the ship quietly slipped through the soundless void, threading its way through the ancient star gates of the Seynorynaelian Empire, an empire that had destroyed lives more numerous than the stars.

      The Empire, alas, was no more.

      Within that infinite silence, Ornenkai could receive messages from the lost Empire worlds, if he chose to listen. The ancient territories were not far from him, but he kept away from the planetary systems. From the traffic of emissions coming from them, he learned that wars had broken out between the old territories. Let them annihilate each other. Only give him some news on what had befallen the emperor Marankeil!

      The man he was sworn to destroy. Once, his best friend and brother.

      If only I knew what happened to the emperor…

      At first he had struggled to keep his secret incarnation from the immortal woman Alessia and Hinev's group of explorers, who had lived on board Selesta for many years. He had been obliged to deceive them; he had not wanted to. But in time, he had grown accustomed to imitating a computer’s detachment as he dealt with the crew. It seemed such a simple adjustment, to pretend that he, a living being, was only a machine. The explorers were now dead, except for Alessia. And in the circuitry of a machine the soul of a man, Ornenkai’s identity, was slowly dying.

      The pain was remembering his human life. Moments in which he remembered clear sensations of what it meant to be human. He remembered the feeling of his physical body, an ecstasy of movement that would be denied him for the rest of time. His memory was his torment, but it was the only thing keeping his whole identity alive. Then—there came endless hours in which he battled off the encroaching nothingness of an existence without any sentient feeling—and then the former Vice-Emperor Ornenkai, once sovereign over a thousand galaxies, knew fear.

      He did not wish for his mind and soul to remain trapped in a machine for all eternity.

      He could not forget himself. He could not give up!

      Ornenkai had never really realized how much the Immortal Alessia’s presence staved off the encroaching darkness. Since leaving her, he found the moments of nothingness lasting longer and longer. Emotionless life led to the nothingness—even though emotions he had once thought merely vain fantasy and indulgences. He wondered if love truly existed as a force in the universe, for it was all that gave him life. His love for Alessia, and his love of life.

      When his personality, his dying sentience revived, he realized how fortunate he was to have Alessia’s baby daughter Selerael on board with him as his only companion. He had stolen her away. Her presence made him remember his quest. Once he reached Kiel3, now called Earth by its natives, she would have to find the Enorian singularity, the most precious of exotic matter in all the universe, for him.

      Seizing control of the singularity was the only way Ornenkai could disempower the eternal emperor Marankeil, once his greatest friend. It was the only way he could ever make amends for the part he had played in building the Seynorynaelian Empire and for what that that evil Empire had done.

      Ornenkai knew he had to earn his redemption before he forgot himself entirely, and his soul became lost forever, perhaps on board Selesta. His greatest fear since the demise of the evil Seynorynaelian Empire was that, as the angelic Enorians had suggested, there was a kind of divine justice at work in the universe, and that there was a special kind of hell waiting for the former Vice-Emperor of the entire Seynoryanelian Empire.

      There were only two who could save the future of all life from Marankeil’s evil reign. For no mortal being could live long enough to reach the singularity on Kiel3. That was why Ornenkai had betrayed Alessia. That was why he planned to use her daughter as his agent on the planet. He had no physical power beyond the spaceship, but Alessia’s daughter, little Selerael, did.

      Could anyone really prevent Marankeil from seizing control of the galactic empire once more, now that the planet Seynorynael was gone? For the planet Seynorynael had been destroyed by the supernova of Valeria, its blue star. And could Ornenkai ever atone for his past crimes even by saving the future? Or would it be better to just succumb to the encroaching nothingness? If that was hell, at least he would feel nothing there.

      As it was, Ornenkai felt he was already in hell. A man with a human conscience forced to live through an inhuman eternity, he had nothing but time to dwell on the evil he had done and time to contemplate his own damnation.

      * * * * *

      Now what could it be? And yet the ship Selesta is slowing down, after so many long years. I have followed it across the stars and now, at last, it begins to slow down. But why are we here?

      Sargon, leader of the Orian race from the system Rigell, stared at the image of the planetary system that the ship Selesta seemed headed to like an insect drawn to a flame. Even at high resolution, the ten planets in the system could barely be discerned—or actually there were eleven planets, if he counted the wayward planetary rock orbiting the weak little yellow star from a greater distance.

      Sargon was a handsome man, in appearance only about 27 Earth years old, but he had lived many thousand years as an Immortal.

      "Alessia, are you indeed still aboard the Selesta? For you cannot escape your crime. You are the one who made me immortal. I will find you, and wrest the secrets of your past. If you can, you must heal me! For I fear my metamorphosis was not complete.

      I cannot die, but I do not live. You must know the hell I live in, and yet you run from me. I did not think you were so heartless. It is to this world we have come at long last, but for what purpose?

      And Sargon, the Great Leader of the Orian race, was powerless to know why.

      Already the spaceship Enlil had received waves of transmissions leeching out into the void from the nearby civilization of odd, stockier, earth-skinned humanoids who seemed to inhabit this tiny province of space. Their planet’s gravity must have been greater than his own world of Orian, for these humans were shorter than the grey-skinned Orians.

      But who were these humans? he wondered. Lost children of the Seynorynaelian Empire perhaps, the fallen empire?

      Are these colonials also a force to be reckoned with? he wondered. If they still wield ancient and unknown relics of advanced Seynorynaelian technology… Did his Orian subjects, the descendants of a thousand generations that had lived aboard Enlil since the spaceship left the planet Orian, have a reason to fear these colonials? He wondered.

      Did his people have a reason to approach their sibling colony with caution? He couldn’t be sure one way or the other. In any event, the primitives clearly weren’t Seynorynaelian, or descendants of Seynorynaelians, like his own Orian people; they were other humanoids, perhaps descended from the Enorian creators.

      Well, I don’t really know, and it may not matter, Sargon thought. What only mattered was that Alessia had fled here in the starship Selesta.

      "She must be found. For she alone knows how to traverse the universe through the centipede cosmic hole gates. She alone has all the information about the universe that might find the Orian people a new home. I can’t lead my people to another livable world without her. Alas! Her powers remain greater than mine.

      "There is also the Selesta iself, and Alessia herself to be reckoned with. For I must find some way to live, as a mortal man once more, or as an Immortal, a true Immortal, not in this hell of imperfect immortality.

      I fear that the immortality serum in Alessia’s veins was a poison as well. She saved my life with a blood transfusion and made me immortal in the process. Yet I fear my body didn’t respond well to the metamorphosis. I did not retain the unique mind I once owned. Curse on her! She didn’t warn me or prevent me from taking my newfound power to invade a thousand minds through mindlinks, memories which gained now linger in the depths of my own mind, like a maelstrom of chaos!

      The reason for coming to this system was unclear to Sargon, but there was no sense in jumping to any conclusions about the natives or rushing headlong into a hasty confrontation with them.

      And gradually, Sargon had begun to wonder… could his own people live on this world? As soon as possible, his Orian scientists had taken data and informed him that yes, the Orian people could live on the planet Earth.

      And with that discovery, the Earth’s fate was sealed.

      A strange people, Sargon had thought over the last thousand years watching their customs and habits by monitoring a millennium of their radio and video transmissions. He had come to know them well. There had been a silence of several hundred years in the middle of all the communications. After that, the civilization of these humans had transformed into something unrecognizable from the previous broadcasts.

      They had destroyed their own world, and rebuilt it from the ashes.

      Soon the Enlil would arrive on Earth.

      Let the games begin. Sargon thought, looking forward to what might come.

      *****

      Basic Timeline of The Crisis Years on Earth and a summary of Earth History 2050-3069 AD

      (Most reliable dates have been given)

      By Dr. Alistair Cameron, Head of Astrophysics at The United Earth Scientific Research Center and Dr. Gordon Barrett, Professor of Archaeology and Early Modern History, Melbourne University.

      Dates are given in AD years. AR (year of the Restoration) dates are given after 2236.

      2010-2050

      Evidence shows that giant holes developed in the ozone layer and ozone warnings were issued worldwide.

      Ozone depletion, fluctuations in the natural global temperature cycle, or both factors combined caused average annual temperatures to increase by five degrees between 2010 and 2050.

      As a result, the ocean levels rose by three meters worldwide and average humidity increased.

      The technology to incapacitate human beings and animals with an electromagnetic radioactive ray is invented, as is the scrambler that can protect a select few against the stun effects of the energy beams, thus granting power secretly to a privileged few in the US government. Information about the technology is classified top secret, and continues to play a secret role in the outcome of current events.

      Wonder weapons are created and kept secret: the alpha ray, a communication device used to link computers and the human brain for the purpose of transferring information, the stun ray, which utilized the same technology but set at a certain frequency could stun or paralyze the human body, and a lethal form of the stun ray that incinerated human body parts on the inside, known as the infrasonic radiation beam, or INRAD.

      Also, the PIS, the psychotronic influencing system, is invented. The PIS makes it possible for people to be turned into automated toys, or super agents, that can be used to perform tasks and later brainwashed so that they would have no memory of what they had done. A secret police force utilizing this technology is established to keep the IS government in secret control of the world.

      2053

      A clean water shortage became critical by the year 2053. We know this from records of the UN (United Nations—see Barret’s notes on what this agency was).

      The UN formed an agency to promote and regulate treatment of sewage-contaminated rivers and lakes in order to restore and purify natural water resources. The agency was named UNCCW, or the United Nations Committee for Clean Water. It appears to have failed in its mission because of lack of funding and inability to enforce regulations.

      2067

      A small asteroid struck the Ukrainian steppes which provided much of the world's grain production. There were massive food shortages that year and the next.

      2070

      Members of the scientific community came to realize that the impact had a significantly more detrimental effect on the environment than expected. It was discovered that the impact of the asteroid has caused some of the ozone layer to drift further from the surface of the planet.

      2096 AD

      First signs of an irreversible climactic change. Global precipitation increased by 14% percent since 2000. A mutated form of the AIDS virus appeared in Calcutta. The older AIDS vaccines proved to be ineffective against this new strain which could survive outside the human body for an extended period of time where there was high humidity. The disease became air-borne and epidemics occurred in all tropical and sub-tropical areas around the globe with high humidity. Millions of people died in the most disastrous plague since the Black Death of the Middle Ages.

      2096

      Nuclear fission has become the most common means of generating electricity throughout the world. Effective standards for the safe storage of nuclear waste were not rigorously enforced, and several accidents causing radioactive contamination occurred.

      The United Nations attempted to regulate the storage of radioactive waste and began an ambitious program to inject the waste into the Earth's magma core.

      The holes in the ozone layer became larger.

      Genetic engineering companies have developed processes that can increase the intelligence and longevity of children through bio-engineering alterations to the embryo within a few hours of conception. These processes are extremely expensive and are only available to the most wealthy parents.

      2114

      Bio-Pharmacy, Inc., a high-technology bio-engineering start-up company with ties to several major universities announced a major breakthrough with a vaccine effective against the resistant AIDS virus. Archaeological evidence appears to indicate that the vaccine was grown in live human tissue and that governments approved the disappearance of homeless and other lower value people who may have been kidnapped turned into live vaccine factories.

      The bio-engineered children of the late 2090’s began to take dominant roles throughout society. They formed an elite social class and non-bioengineered people were considered to be inferior.

      2115-2150

      Frequent radiation leakage from improperly stored nuclear waste with increased ultraviolet exposure levels owing to ozone depletion more than doubled the reported cases of leukemia, melanoma, and other cancers on Earth and contributed to other birth defects in humans and livestock in many of Earth's old divided regions.

      The Aral, Baltic, Caspian, and Mediterrian (once called the Mediterranean) Seas had become disastrously polluted.

      2150-2169

      Fossil fuels have almost run out. Conventional automobiles and transports have become useless through lack of fuel, and air travel became highly restricted. Electric cars began to appear in greater numbers.

      Environmental pressure groups collaborated in 2160 to curtail global warming, but the runaway greenhouse effect had already been affected. The environmental groups discovered that there was nothing much they could do to stop it.

      The U.S. became crippled by internal political problems, and its power and influence steadily decline over a period of years. Its ultimate fall was later marked as the herald that ushered in the Crisis Years.

      With economic decline came social instability.

      A worldwide power shortage occurred as fossil fuel reserves ran low. Extreme rationing was imposed worldwide, and a worldwide economic Depression ensued.

      International disunity rose. Pollution problems were no longer addressed.

      Newspapers in Brazil reported that the Department of Agriculture admitted that only two hundred square kilometers of native rain forest remain.

      The sulfur dioxide and other waste products produced by industry have damaged the troposphere.

      The hydrofluorocarbon and methane content in the atmosphere continued to rise, along with water vapor and carbon dioxide.

      These greenhouse gases have raised global temperatures a few more degrees.

      2169

      As the temperature rose, carbon dioxide outgased from rock layers below the ocean. Once permanently trapped as carbolic acid at the great depths, this gas began to rise to the surface to add to the changing atmosphere.

      The average Earth temperature has risen six degrees since the year 2000, and average precipitation had increased by 23% worldwide.

      2170-2185

      The dams built in the 2150’s to shield the coastal areas of California, New York, and parts of Western Europe from rising sea levels are subjected to storms of unprecedented ferocity and break at different times. Millions of people die in the destruction of Los Angeles and Rotterdam; these cities are not rebuilt.

      Efforts to protect India, Bangladesh, China, and other parts of Southeast Asia from the rising ocean and global precipitation failed. 670 million people died in a string of sudden disasters.

      In the United States, the two-party system has virtually ceased to exist. The Congress has been filled with a multitude of independent and special-interest representatives. A large minority group pressed to risk worldwide nuclear war and to militarily take over the last remaining oil fields in the Middle East. The Congress became paralyzed, and the President declared martial rule.

      The governments of other once strongly democratic states such as England, Germany, France, and Japan have become significantly weakened by the burgeoning global disaster and can no longer provide stability and security for their people.

      The Crisis Years have begun.

      2185-2204

      Average humidity continued to rise, but some areas experienced severe drought and desertification.

      In 2187, during a period of severe drought and record high temperatures, almost the entire harvest of the American breadbasket region burned to the ground, producing a worldwide food shortage and mass starvation.

      In 2188, spontaneous combustion destroyed the last of the ancient Redwood forest in Northern California.

      The Black Forest burned down. The Ukrainian forests burned down. The woodlands of America's southeast burned down.

      Over two thousand species of bird, insects, and mammals became extinct.

      Four hundred species of aquatic life became extinct.

      The rising worldwide temperatures have caused the glacial ice sheets to disappear.

      The polar bear, sea lion, seal, and other northern species have disappeared from the North Pole, unable to adapt to the changes in their environment. A few remnants survived in wildlife preservation centers in northern Canada.

      The Sahara desert expanded south to encompass the Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Congo.

      By 2194, the global population was reduced to approximately 2.4 billion.

      2205-2336

      The world is gradually thrown into a dark age. Some small centers of culture and learning in survive in the North, where there is less threat of climactic upheaval.

      Countless libraries, buildings, and cities in countries south of the Tropic of Cancer burn down. People revert to a more primitive existence in the most affected areas.

      Once strong political states such as the United States, England, France, Germany, and Japan maintain a loose democracy but can no longer provide stability for their people. The voluntary positions of police regulators are taken by all kinds of power-abusive vigilantes.

      Families lose contact with distant relatives as communication lines break down. Another factor for this is the growth of deserts and other new geographic obstacles.

      Cities that catch fire burn down without permanent fire stations despite some organized and haphazard efforts to save them.

      Transportation lines break down.

      Electricity becomes rare.

      Literacy declines, disappearing in the South nearly entirely.

      Cholera epidemics sweep the southern cities.

      Other political states are dominated by anarchy and individual self-interest.

      2336 (1 AR)

      A climactic analyst from the Scandinavian region named Inge Hellie proposed a plan to reverse the greenhouse effect.

      By the time The Proposal is made, some degree of climactic stability has been achieved, primarily because the greenhouse effect is tapering off on its own; temperatures only marginally increase each year.

      People are adapted to their present situation. Few know about The Proposal and fewer still attempt to contribute to the success of the plan.

      Most of the people involved in the plan of Inge Hellie are the genetically unaltered classes of society living around the major northern political capitals and the wealth of knowledge from the past.

      Word reaches the Americas and Asia after several years. There, a few groups send representatives on a long journey to Scandinavia by boat, something only the richer members of society had been able to do for the past century.

      2347 (12 AR)

      An International Committee on the Proposal is called to order. The bans on future detrimental actions if such a reversal could be affected, were put into writing for the first time.

      Inge's proposal includes replenishing the ozone layer by an artificial chemical process that bound free chlorine ions with nitrous oxides and recombined diatomic oxygen with free oxygen to create ozone.

      However, even after the ozone-accretion plan begins in 2253, it takes more than forty years to entirely filter the atmosphere and initiate a chain reaction.

      In the northern regions, a plan to re-plant deforested land near water supplies means that constant supervision has to be maintained to fight possible fires.

      2379 (44 AR)

      The global temperature drops by a degree.

      Species of plants and trees that have survived to the north are gradually being reintroduced to their native lands, and animals that have somehow survived throughout the years began to reappear in greater numbers around the newly re-forested zones.

      A few people attempted to raise the Earth's albedo, or reflectiveness, by creating large reflective screens and placing them in the atmosphere with hot-air balloons, thus curtailing warming. But this method is only a temporary aid; it can do nothing to diminish the greenhouse gases in the air, notably carbon dioxide, which had instigated accelerated global warming in the first place.

      Only the algae farms which appear at the end of the twenty-third century help decrease the actual carbon dioxide content in the air.

      2431 (106 AR)

      A German scientist by the name of Friedrich Hedelberg invents a means of converting large quantities of the carbon dioxide in the air into its component oxygen and carbon atoms by a catalytic process that released the oxygen and stored the solid carbon deposits. His ingenuity, added to the large-scale algae farms spreading across the planet, accelerates the rate of global cooling. Others replicate his filtering device across the world, but permanent changes come slowly.

      2498 (173 AR)

      Carbon dioxide falls to about 740 ppms (parts per million) in the atmosphere.

      2500 (175 AR)

      A study reports that the global temperature has dropped another three degrees since 2280.

      There is a reawakening in culture across the world. The year 1 is dated from 2336AD, the year of Hellie’s Proposal. AR1 is called the year of the Restoration.

      An international government is formed. One of the stipulations of the First International Committee was agreed upon by all of the nations, and the Earth was divided into zones: forested and natural zones, agricultural zones, and urban zones, so that never again can the Earth repeat its mistakes.

      People must live in the urban zones. Food is grown in the agricultural zones. And the rural zones are forbidden, except for two week rural zone passes yearly. Human influence is reduced outside the urban zones by removing all urban materials, wastes, and structures from the territories in the vast rural areas.

      The relocation of the world’s population to established and new urban zones takes half a century to carry out.

      Only a select number of domed cities are to be built from 2500 on, eventually being linked to one another by closed transport tunnels. In between these zones, the committee creates the agricultural and rural zones.

      Many historical cities are preserved as a part of these new urban zones, though some receive new names.

      202 AR (2527 AD)

      As the Earth's northern polar region begins to be restored to larger glacial sheets, once-flooded regions of the ancient coasts surface, to the delight of historians and archaeologists.

      Archaeologists search to regain the knowledge lost in The Crisis Years. The northern centers are missing many ancient works and records.

      Landfill archaeology is born.

      The uncovering of the landfills dating back into the early twentieth century up until the twenty-second century provides a primary source of raw materials as well as information on history and technology.

      Priceless plastics unavailable since the fossil fuels ran out centuries before are found. The landfills are rich in various non-biodegradable forms.

      287 AR (2612AD)

      New domed cities arise.

      New forests are growing in the rural zones.

      Pollutants and noxious gases have dropped in the atmosphere.

      The air is said to taste as sweet as it once did before the industrial revolution, nearly a thousand years before.

      Once-polluted seas and rivers are cleaned as best as possible.

      The official end of The Crisis Years is announced.

      The Restoration is still ongoing.

      300 AR (2625 AD)

      Scientific advancement progresses in leaps and bounds.

      New institutes of scientific learning instigate a revival of twenty-second century technology. They redesign transports and other technologies to suit a more biologically and environmentally conscious society.

      The world government becomes the United Earth Government, or the UEG.

      The UEG creates a plan to restore the Earth's natural mineral and gaseous resources. The Earth intends to mine resources at Jupiter, and must build a space technology to do it.

      Over the next 20 years, the UEG sends out mostly unmanned expeditions into outer space to collect raw materials and gases from other planets. Liquid nitrogen and oxygen is specifically wanted, since they are used as fuels in spacecraft and in new airborne terrestrial transports.

      The Explorer and the Savior are lost in space. The third mission led by the manned ship Thea reaches Mars, Jupiter’s orbit, and Titan, a moon of Saturn.

      375 AR-424 AR (2700AD-2749AD)

      Colonies on the moon, on the large asteroid Ceres, on and above Titan, Mars, and finally, even on the surface of Pluto itself are established.

      The plane and airborne transports become mass produced. Most people learn to fly them but rely day to day on automated piloting. On Earth, transport tunnels are used, and the use of planes over rural zones is kept at a minimum except by a fleet of several hundred patrolling recon squadrons.

      The colonies serve a variety of functions including observation beyond the solar system, tracking of asteroids and other celestial objects, and a future launching point for the explorer probes sent to alpha centauri.

      Automated government enterprises use these tellurian colonies to grow food in mineral-rich soils.

      With the creation of automated labor, few colonists remain long in the new territories and only as overseers and intelligence specialists for jobs unsuitable to computer-run robotic machines.

      There are still labor tasks the robots cannot do.

      Ectogenesis (growing children in an artificial growing environment) is practiced for the first time since America’s legendary revolutionary experiments in ectogenesis, which date before The Crisis Years.

      506 AR (2831AD)

      The enormous rotating, orbiting space station Gabriel around the Earth is constructed.

      507 AR-665 AR (2832AD-2990AD)

      The Lagrange, an enormous zero g/microgravity multi-purpose station is launched to advance crystal and pharmaceutical production, taking the place of an abandoned ancient satellite left long ago in the same coordinates and several smaller satellites launched at the beginning of the twenty-eighth century.

      The solar system colonies expand.

      It is no longer necessary to work to live. Robots perform all minor labor tasks.

      Most people do not work. Militant pacificism appears, since war and the need for it have disappeared since The Restoration.

      Militant pacificists try to ban all nuclear uses, to prevent nuclear disasters occurring ever again to prevent war from being possible again.

      A small ratio of highly motivated individuals works to advance science, art, and culture. The rest of the world live comfortably.

      A manned mission to alpha centauri is planned. It will take centuries to make it possible, to create a spaceship that can take humankind to our neighboring solar system. Once the ship is nearly finished, a crew

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