Chapter Text
And so it goes: in the beginning, there was chaos—a yawning nothingness.
Out of the void emerged the splendorous light of creation, a miracle by its own right, a baffling and marvelous explosion which delivered, into existence, everything, and everyone. Just like that, thrust forth from a cosmic singularity, came the ever-expanding universe. The whole of the world.
This story is difficult to convey in simple terms—as if it were impossible to tell using any words at all, let alone the ones I find myself speaking to you now—but there is something to be said of genesis, of birth, and the way it all began.
Nine and a half light-years away from a solitary flare star in the constellation of Sagittarius is the pale, blue marble of a planet called Earth.
It is shining, it is beautiful, it is fragile, and it is home—and, though it teems with life, it is also lonely. Its numerous inhabitants, who are all in some way connected with one another, have reached out into the heavenly abyss for as long as they have been capable of containing the thought in their minds that they are not alone.
They are rational and contradictory creatures ever-searching for answers in a universe which is increasingly tending toward unrelenting disorder that further obscures the truths they seek. They are generous and selfish, compassionate and cruel, whole and divided, and they contain complex simultaneity despite being so biologically simple.
Tenaciously launching themselves headlong into the glittering black tapestry of space, hopeful and hopeless, time and time again, the most ambitious of humankind embark on a quest for life beyond the scope of their tiny world.
Their journey begins in places that are, all at once, significant and inconsequential at points in time that are equal parts pivotal and unexceptional, such as the great and ordinary state of Texas in the spring of 2010.
In a room in the basement of an unmarked office building in Corpus Christi, there is a desk upon which the personnel files of four finalist candidates lie. Outside, the sky is dark with the clouds of a tremendous storm. It is, all at once, a gale like none other and every other that came before it.
It is the eve of history; it is a coincidence, it is momentous, it is terrifying, and it is resplendent.