Warning

It had to be some kind of mistake, she was sure. The ship's computers were programmed to the height of perfection by the smartest of the smart, but even Harvard and Princeton graduates had to mess up sometimes. Still, the processors had never made an error like this before, and the too-good-to-be-true signals—especially at a time as dire as now—made her uneasy.

Every other planet they had tested before this one had procured several red lights. The atmospheric pressure was too high, or the star was a bit too close, or there was some other minute but undeniable difference between the planet's reality and conditions necessary to support human life.

When her missionary ship had been sent out just over fifteen years ago, the NASA computers had been much less sophisticated than the newly-updated ones on board, and could detect little more than which planets had the bare necessities to become second home to the human race. So Mira and a team of a few other astrophysicists, biologists, and engineers had been sent on this pioneer journey to discern up close which planet it would be. This project had had high hopes, and seemed to be going well... Until the Slip.

Even the highly trained scientific minds on board could not explain what had happened to the Pioneer I fourteen years ago. The only hypotheses made were so unlikely that most of the crew dismissed them as blasphemy, but all the scientists agreed on one thing: the Slip seemed inexplicable if using rational predictions. The Pioneer had been about 12 light-years from Earth, barely at the start of its journey, when all of the ship's lights and computer systems shut off at once. Mira did not remember what occurred directly after, but later it was deduced that the ship's entire crew had simultaneously passed out moments after the shutoff, and had remained unconscious for at least several hours.

When they awakened, the ships computers had partially rebooted, but their communication with Earth had been completely cut off. And to make matters worse, their ship's location appeared to be completely different from where it had been hours ago—possibly in an entirely different galaxy cluster. The Pioneer's router itself had broken during the shutoff, so the scientists had to make their best guesses by studying star clusters through the windows of the ship, and didn't have much success in deducing their location. It did appear, however, that they had inexplicably "slipped" through a large amount of space in a small amount of time, and so the curious incident was dubbed the Slip.

Some scientists suggested that they had somehow gone through a wormhole in space, but evidence of this type of thing was scarce. Some of the more religious passengers thought it could have been an act of a Higher Power itself, although why a Higher Power would do something so malicious was beyond reason. Whatever it had been, the Slip had completely thrown the Pioneer off course and had nearly decimated the ship and those onboard.

The almost destruction of the ship had, of course, sent its inhabitants into a state of panic. How were they to return to Earth if they could not communicate with their home base or even locate where they were in space? It seemed that all hope was lost, until it was discovered that one part of the control panel had been salvaged—the Panel, which scanned the systems of planets to judge their habitability. And thus, their mission that had once been one to discover a new planet for humans to eventually settle on became a desperate search for a home for those onboard the Pioneer.

The mission of the Pioneer had originally planned to last five years at most, hopefully less if they could find an Earthlike planet sooner. The supplies on board were enough to last ten years to account for a possible growing population on the ship, plus an emergency reserve in case something went awry, which it did. But scientists back at home hadn't, couldn't have, predicted that anything as drastic as the Slip would happen, and the people aboard the Pioneer were beginning to run out of food, water, and—most frighteningly—clean air after fourteen years of careful rationing. The passengers aboard the Pioneer were running out of time. If they were to survive, nutritionists predicted that they had to find a habitable planet within months—maybe even weeks.