Chapter Text
On September 13, 2000, an unknown object folded in somewhere halfway between the Earth and the Moon.
It did not travel through the intervening space in any conventional sense. It simply exchanged one set of coordinates for another, displacing the vacuum with a violence that rippled out through the fabric of spacetime itself.
On the surface of the Earth, gravitational wave observatories, whose sensitivity was thought to be a decade or two away from detecting astronomical gravitational waves, detected the anomaly. Sensors spiked, registering the distortion as it washed over the planet. Automated systems, programmed to flag anomalies, dutifully compiled the data and dispatched email notifications to researchers across the globe.
In a normal timeline, these alerts would have been the discovery of the century. However, the events that were to follow only a couple of hours later meant that no one would get around to checking their inboxes or looking at the raw data. It would be weeks before anyone performed the retrospective analysis and realized that the gravitational waves were the herald of the object’s arrival.
For thirty minutes, the object fell silently toward the planet, its appearance unnoticed by the sleeping world below. Then, optical telescopes caught the anomaly: a huge and bright object, previously undiscovered, plummeting through the cislunar void.
By the time the alarm was raised, the object was already breaching the upper atmosphere. It streaked through the sky, a burning lance of superheated plasma that turned night into a blinding, terrifying day. The object was colossal, its mass and velocity generating a bow shock of apocalyptic proportions. As it screamed over the land, the pressure wave hammered down, flattening a city in an instant, reducing concrete and steel to dust before the roar of its passage even reached the ground.
The object’s trajectory terminated at South Ataria Island. It slammed into the earth, the kinetic energy transforming instantly into a searing hemisphere of incandescent plasma. A huge explosion erupted, vaporizing the island's surface and sending a mushroom cloud climbing high into the stratosphere, marking the arrival of the object that history would later dub the Alien Star Ship One, or ASS-1.
Just a few minutes later, as the mushroom cloud from the South Ataria impact was still expanding into the stratosphere, a second cataclysm struck. A gigantic explosion, one that dwarfed the devastation caused by the crash of the unknown object, erupted with its epicenter deep within Antarctica.
The release of energy was absolute. The ice sheet and the bedrock beneath it vaporized in an instant, and a pillar of light pierced the atmosphere, visible from halfway across the globe. This event, which history would come to know as Second Impact, struck the planet with the force of a hammer blow. It was violent enough to physically tilt the axis of Earth’s rotation and send the oceans surging over coastlines worldwide, permanently altering the geography of the planet.
In the immediate aftermath, chaos reigned. Two billion people perished, their lives extinguished in the initial blast, the subsequent earthquakes that shattered tectonic plates, or the tsunamis that scoured the land. Civilization teetered on the brink of total collapse as the global climate shifted and nations vanished under the rising tides.
Yet, amidst the apocalyptic upheaval, humanity did not simply lay down and die. As conflicts over dwindling resources and survival flared up in the ruins of the old world, a desperate rationality took hold among the surviving powers. Multiple nations, recognizing that the arrival of the object on South Ataria Island was intrinsically linked to their survival, managed to form a task force under the auspices of the United Nations.
This was a rare case of multinational cooperation during a period otherwise defined by bloodshed and anarchy. Only weeks after the world had changed forever, the UN task force arrived at the scarred remnants of South Ataria Island to investigate the silent vessel that had fallen from the stars.
Over the ensuing years, the initial chaos calcified into a grim, gray reality. The wars over water and arable land burned themselves out, not because of treaties, but because there were simply fewer people left to fight them. The final tally was a silence that stretched across continents: the human population had been cut in half.
In the face of this near-extinction event, the geopolitical squabbles of the old era seemed like the tantrums of children. The presence of the alien vessel on South Ataria Island served as a monolith of undeniable truth: humanity was not alone, and the universe was hostile. Many considered that Earth had already been attacked, a theory fueled by fear and the need for a unified enemy. To them, the vessel was not an explorer; it was a gunboat, and Second Impact was the opening salvo of a war for survival.
Drawing from the elite ranks of national militaries, UN Spacy was formally established. It was an unprecedented military organization, granted supranational authority and a singular, terrifying mandate: to build a defense capable of repelling an enemy that could travel between stars and scorch entire worlds.
The cornerstone of this defense was the corpse of the invader itself. The scorched husk of the ASS-1 became the most valuable real estate on Earth. Under the banner of the UN, the greatest scientific minds remaining on the planet converged on the island. They dissected the giant, stripping away its secrets layer by layer. The breakthroughs came in torrents — gravity control, miniature thermonuclear reactors, material sciences that defied previous understanding. The alien technology did not just advance human science; it catapulted it forward by centuries. The reconstruction of the ASS-1 began in earnest, transforming the wreck into the flagship of humanity’s future fleet.
But while the world’s eyes were fixed on the sky and the reconstruction of the alien vessel, a different kind of research was taking place in the shadows.
Hidden behind layers of security clearance and shell corporations, a secret organization known as Gehirn operated with a different focus. They were not interested in the mechanical shell of the ASS-1. Their attention was fixed on the samples retrieved from the epicenter of the catastrophe, the dead, red sea where the frozen continent once stood. They studied the remnants of the being that had triggered Second Impact, the entity of light that had birthed the destruction.
While UN Spacy built walls of armor and energy to keep the aliens out, Gehirn sought to understand the god that had been sleeping beneath the ice, preparing for a war that would be fought not just with cannons, but with the very essence of life itself.