Olympius Ascending

Chapter 1/Introduction

Everyone remembers their childhood. The moon was a gooey ball of swiss cheese, you would fall asleep in the backseat during a long car ride, and you would play with your action figures and toy planes in blissful ignorance without responsibility or obligation. But not everyone remembers growing up. People stop remembering when people started to leave you home alone without worry, stopped checking on you in the bath or the times adults could curse around you without apology.

Sometimes, events influence your maturity. They force you to grow up, they force upon you responsibility and obligation that you can't bear. For most, these events can be things such as loved ones dying, divorces, diseases, and the tragic accidents that happen normally in everyone's life. What happened to me was not a natural occurrence, nor was it as simple as as a tragic accident.

I suppose it started with the disappearances. It was all over the news. People from all over the globe, some of them powerful figures, started to vanish out of thin air. The theories were wild, like disease and kidnapping. The truth was much more wild. I had bigger and less interesting things in my life to tend to, like homework.

Of course I didn't pay the situation much mind, I was a 14 year old boy who was more worried about his school's freshman dance. It was bound to happen that I would be one of the disappearances. It's what I get for not giving the situation attention.

Karma's a bitch.

The statistic are 1 in 1,400,000. One person in a 1.4 million people, and it had to be me.

Maybe an explanation is needed here. I'm trapped in what I believe to be a spaceship, unless the stars floating past the windows are holographic. I really hope they're holographic, and this is some psychopath totally human killer who abducted 5000 people, but no such luck.

You probably have a lot of questions. I can't exactly give the who, what, when, where and how; I'm pretty much clueless too. But I'll try my best.

I'm trapped in a spaceship that's soaring god knows where. There are 5,000 other people here with me. It was most likely some form of extraterrestrial thing that wants to take a poke at a couple earthlings, but I still have hope it's some psycho maniac who managed to abduct all of us. I don't know how long I've been here, or how I got here.

There are a lot of cows too. I have no idea what that's about, but it smells horrible.

Let me see what I can explain, though. It'll take a bit of time, so sit back, grab a soda, and pretend to not be bored by the huge scientific speech I'm about to give.

We're starting at the very beginning, which is a lot further back than you would think.

4.6 billion years ago, all the way back to to the formation of our solar system. Dust and gas and a bunch of other spacey things started to form the sun at the center of a nebula. Once the sun was all done, there was some stuff left over. That stuff started to come together to make the planets, bla bla bla. This kind of thing had already happened in plenty of places before the earth (and when I mean plenty, I mean about 2 or three trillion times). A couple thousand light years away from us, another planet was forming around the same time. It was in what scientists call the Goldilocks zone (weird name, right? Who knows, scientists are weird.) Things weren't too hot, things weren't too cold, they were what you'd call Earth-like conditions. An asteroid crashed into that planet. That specific asteroid had these things called extremophiles living on it.

Extremophiles are little bacteria that can take a lot. High pressure, high temperatures, and tons of rock were ideal conditions for them. They could survive without oxygen, and were pretty much indestructible.