Heroic

Chapter One

For the entirety of their existence, human beings have reached up into the sky with their primitive hands, clawing at the darkness of the infinite vacuum of space, desperately grabbing, probing and prodding in a desperate attempt to find life.

They have failed.

Even with the advent of clumsy electronic devices, metal extensions of their limited limbs, the search for life outside of their small green-blue habitat has been an utter failure.

Mankind on the planet Earth is alone. A heaving pile of organisms trapped on their own world, cut off from the universe writ large, sitting in its own filth on an evolutionary backwater incapable of traveling, seeing or hearing very far.

The quest has been an epic failure. Most humans do not care.

They are happy to live their humdrum existence, spinning around the globe on its axis, slowly inching their away around the sun for a pointless three-hundred-and-sixty-five day journey to nowhere.

They don't care if life is out there and it never crosses their minds. The few who do care, who are interested, who spend years in classrooms and laboratories and in offices, sacrificing contact with others and deemphasizing companionship -- are failures as well.

Earth is alone and too stupid to reach far enough out into the universe to grab anyone or anything worthwhile.

On rare occasions, humans are able to send one of their soulless machines to the equivalent of a brisk walk down a short hallway to stupidly swirl a metallic hand out in the dirt, returning a meaningless sample of the soil back home.

That has been the pinnacle of human beings humiliatingly adequate thrusts out into the cosmos.

But billions of miles away, far from the range of humanity's tendrils and beyond Earth's primitive capacity to understand, there is life.

There, in their solar system, the planets orbit a sun. Unlike our yellow-hued orb, infamous for belching its volcanic sputum into the darkness on its path to inevitable implosion and collapse, the star at the center of this system is red.

For the planets it orbits the sun sits in the sky, showering its redness down on the life below. On Kendon, the seventh planet from the sun, the redness reflects on the glass atop the mountains and particularly from the gleaming towers that dominate much of the landscape across its twelve continents.

The redness is ubiquitous and reassures the billions of people scurrying around on the world below that things will always remain the same, that despite the vagaries of every day life and all its annoyances and obligations, the sun will always be there.

And yet, Kendon is doomed. Soon it will cease to be, existing solely as dead, lifeless, cold chunks of dirt and rock, spinning through space on a collision course with the throbbing, volanic red sun.

Beneath its red sun, the vast majority of Kendon's population was in blissful ignorance. They had no idea that every breath they took was a cause for rejoice and nourishment because it would soon be their last.

Separated across the universe by hundreds of millions of millions of miles, this was what connected Kendon and Earth. Ignorance. Ignorance of all but a few select members of the population, who knew that Earth just couldn't be alone, and that Kendon's fate was sealed.

Qwarel was one of the lucky few. He had gone over the information again and again, double/triple/quadruple checking his math to confirm his conclusions.

The result was always the same.

Kendon was going to die. Soon.