The Girl in the Gym

The connectivity

While Inaya and Jack's story takes shape and they hurl toward their destiny, changing the course of civilization itself, let's take a moment to head back in time.

Back when we can pinpoint the exact moment which led to the events that have unfurled millennia later. The phenomenon which was followed by a string of occurrences and rare coincidences that found Inaya all alone in the world. Except for a beacon whose power she knew nothing about. If someone had told her what her heirloom, the precious fidget spinner was actually an outer world piece of technology and a highly advanced means of communication, she would have scoffed and disbelieved it. Oh, she would have been fascinated no doubt, but disbelieving.

It all started with Planet Zero, the eye of the veritable storm.

The beginning of Planet Zero was quite unremarkable. Anti-climactic even, considering the sort of intelligentsia that came to populate it, and how they changed the destiny of another world.

Coming back to its formation, there was no big bang, no major cosmic event preceding it. Just like the people who would come to inhabit the Planet Zero, the process was efficient and straightforward, purely scientific and logical. And the result was almost perfect. It was a sight to behold, nonetheless, and its beauty unmatched. There was a cloud of hot gas and rocks which were spinning around in a distant part of the universe. When they encountered a huge magnetic rock, its gravitational field attracted particular gases and rocks, and it started spinning faster and faster till it looked like a blur. After about a hundred years or so, it started cooling down, and the spinning slowed to almost a stop. The gases and rocks solidified into a dense ball, which took several more hundred years to cool down and solidify enough to have a distinctive shape. It took several hundred more years for life to appear on it. By then it had formed mountains, forests, caves and had a rich deposit of minerals and metals. There was an abundance of fruit, grains and vegetables. And since there were no animals at all, theirs became a purely vegetarian society as a result.