PRELUDE

Text © Chris Eales, 2006-10

21:40

The Moon became the 1st permanent off-world habitat in the history of mankind, within 50 years (2090-2140 or 2140-2190?) there were more than 20 individual colonies on the surface with a population of over 30m.

[c.f. Moon, dir Duncan Jones, 2009]

21:56

Many of them were young men & women now, some of them had never left the colony. Many of them had only ever seen Earth on a computer terminal screen. I didn’t think that was such a tragedy. But now there was a problem, the 1st hint of old Earth’s troubles arising within New Earth’s domain. [ new-earth.com? www.Compound.NewEarth? ]

Never before had there been any serious acts of violence on New Earth, never had there been an attack, not so much as a riot in the more than 20 years that the colony had been populated (since c2135?). All that had changed in the last few hours, there was going to be a difficult time ahead, and all I knew was that ESEC [Earth Space Exploration Co.] and Joe Creigh had dragged me along for the ride.

21:60 idea conceived
The United Nations World Government Council, or ‘The Leaders’ as most people usually called them, had conceived of the plan to build an entirely new habitat for the Human Race, in response to the multitude of problems that developed on Earth over the course of the C22nd. They squabbled over it for about 30 years, and finally somebody somewhere managed to forge an agreement for it to go ahead. .

21:90
Planning started; collecting the resources, arranging finances, and construction was supposed to begin at the turn of the (23rd) century, however various delays meant that they missed the turn by about 3 years.

22:03
Started building what was to become the single most ambitious project in the history of Humanity;

2 enormous bio-spheres sitting upon a vast rectangular base known as ‘The Compound’;

A hub; the most advanced system of computer networks ever devised, capable of administrating & supporting the entire lives of a population of over 1m people, and able to provide resources necessary for numerous research centres & laboratories, where some of Humanity’s finest minds would be able to work on what they hoped would be the next generation of scientific discoveries. The bio-spheres stretched to over 80,000 ft above the compound, and were constructed from a material known as Plasma-Webbing. I didn’t pretend to understand where the hell they had come up with the stuff. I had read about it when the colony opened, but I had only been a kid then, no older than 12. I seemed to recall that it had a foundation that was some sort of plastic, textile mesh, and they spliced it with a kind of semi-organic matter, and created these virtually unbreakable cords that formed the framework. Then they webbed it together and shaped it, and moulded it and in the end they had their spheres in place. The plasma-web spheres were invisible if you looked up at them from the colony below, but if you were gazing at New Earth from outside, as I always had, you could just about see the outline of the spheres as they gently reflected the light of the distant stars.

22:28
Compound completed
Activated / stocked colony (lasted 5 years)

22:33
Activation complete & opened, with 1m people arriving from Earth to begin a new life off-world. The people had been selected carefully, covering every age group, every nation, and every industry. The idea was that the colony should be broadly representative of Humanity as a whole, although I had never understood why that was such a good thing. If I’d been planning it, there were plenty of aspects of Humanity that I wouldn’t have minded leaving behind. By all accounts it was a great success.

1st Families settled, new-borns within 1st year of opening, 1st generation of Human Beings not to have been born on either the Earth or its Moon.

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