The Other Path

Prologue.

Prologue.

I suppose we should have seen it coming, in the beginning.

Many signs throughout the years had pointed to it; increasing reports of seismic ruptures, tectonic plates collapsing, earthquakes and tsunamis of a frequency and scale no one had ever envisioned.

Volcanic activity increased dramatically and as global panic hit, governments around the world began collapsing under the strain of trying to regain a semblance of control.

The sky began to darken.

 The lights around the world winked out, one by one, as the power companies fell to calamity by way of the earth rupturing beneath them and personnel abandoning their stations.

The world was thrown into chaos.

Looting, sacking and killing ran rampant in those early days.

The great countries turned into cesspools of violence and fear. Nowhere was safe. But the World Government, with its last dying breath had created a plan. One thousand intergalactic ships were launched, each housing one hundred thousand souls.

One hundred million survivors, from major points around the world, survivors handpicked for genetic disposition, skills, IQ and potential. A bare one hundred million of the seven billion of our race that populated a dying planet.

The World Government had done what it had to; it had chosen the parts of humanity that would enable it to function and develop on a new world. There was an uproar, the hundreds of millions of people that were to stay and face death rebelled.

Slaughter was imminent.

Of the one hundred million set to leave, only sixty three million made it off-planet alive. A set number were adults trained in their fields: geniuses and leaders, artisans and scientists. The majority were children, who were to be trained in the fields in which they showed genetic or intellectual potential.

A new planet, one hundred light years from home, was chosen for colonization. Our race, the ones chosen to live, left our planet shamed and ridden with a guilt so bone deep it would leave a mark generations later, changing what it meant to be Human.

All of humanity was lost, that day, when our planet took its last, shuddering breath. The day the Earth died.