Earth's Fate

In the late 21st century, roughly between the years 2080 and 2090, Earth was dominated by sprawling mega-corporations locked in brutal, resource-driven wars. These conflicts, waged for dwindling supplies of clean water, arable land, and energy sources, reshaped the political landscape. Nation-states eroded under the weight of corporate influence, and private armies became the enforcers of this new world order.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) existed during this era, but it was largely sidelined. The potential of AGI to disrupt or dismantle corporate power structures made it a carefully suppressed technology. Corporations either ignored AGI or deliberately sabotaged its advancement, viewing it as an existential threat to their dominance.

As the wars escalated, Earth’s biosphere began a rapid collapse, edging closer to becoming uninhabitable. Faced with imminent extinction, desperate alliances formed among rival factions. From this fragile cooperation emerged the Polaris Program—a last-ditch effort to preserve humanity and its cultural legacy by colonizing new worlds.

The Polaris Program was not a singular effort but a multi-vessel exodus. Six colony ships, each designed as massive generational arks, were constructed and launched toward Polaris. Each ship was destined for one of the four known major continents, with some ships serving as contingency or multi-regional missions. The ships carried thousands of genetically engineered humans, baseline humans, AI systems, and critical infrastructure to establish footholds on the alien world.

The colony ships, known as ARK-class vessels, utilized a combination of gravity-assist slingshot maneuvers and propulsion concepts similar to Project Orion, which used controlled nuclear detonations to achieve extraordinary speeds. These slingshot maneuvers required complex, real-time calculations to safely navigate interstellar trajectories. The onboard AI, known as R.H.E.A., was critical to this process, executing navigation solutions that would have been impossible for human crews alone.

Thanks to these technologies, the ARK vessels achieved speeds approaching 99% the speed of light. While over four centuries passed on Earth during their voyage, the relativistic effects of near-light-speed travel compressed the subjective duration for those aboard to mere decades. The ships were initially designed as generational arks, but the combination of high-velocity transit and cryogenic hibernation cycles transformed the mission into a single-era exodus.

The colony ship central to this story is the UEAV Ouroboros (United Earth ARK Vessel Ouroboros)—one of the six, whose colonists would settle the Delta Region on the continent of Primaris Gaia.

When the ARK finally arrived, a mere four months ago, Earth had gone silent. No verifiable transmissions, no updates, only dead air. Whether Earth survived the final throes of its wars and environmental collapse remains a mystery. Some colonists believe Earth still stands; others believe it is a ghost.

The descendants of ARK’s crew now fight to survive on Polaris, haunted by the unresolved fate of their homeworld and divided by the lingering ideologies and corporate legacies they carried with them.