The World

Before the Meridian

Humanity nearly finished itself in the middle of the twenty-first century. The great powers went to war, nations dissolved, and billions died.

The conflict ended in a way that no one would have thought of: a missile failed on the way up and broke apart above a thousand kilometers, too high for the pieces to fall back and burn. Its warhead never armed. What it left instead was a cloud of fragments crossing the orbits where everything valuable lived, and the first collisions made more fragments, and those made more. Inside a decade the planet was wrapped in a shell of its own broken machines. Nothing could launch or land without being torn apart. Communications went dark. The war ground to a halt because no one could coordinate it any longer. Afterward it was called the Orbital Collapse.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a listening station caught a signal from deep space. Steady, mathematical, patient, and unmistakably made by someone. Humanity called it the Lighthouse and traced it to a source roughly two thousand light-years out. No one ever learned who was sending it, or why. The one ship dispatched to answer it directly has never been heard from again.

With the knowledge that they were not alone in the universe, humanity finally found something to unite it under a single banner. Decades were spent clearing the orbital debris around Earth. Humanity rebuilt as best it could and turned to the stars. Sol was the first system settled: Luna, then Mars, then Venus. Despite this, the damage humanity had done to Earth was too great. The planet could not sustain them as it once had, and the colonies could only take so many. So they built a fleet instead. Project Phoenix, each ship bound for a different star, one of them aimed straight at the Lighthouse.

The Meridian

A sleeper ship rather than a generation ship: the colonists ride the voyage in stasis, and the crew wake in rotation. Eighteen numbered habitat modules and lettered cargo sections run the length of an elongated body, riding centrifugal rings for gravity. The colony briefings described her as a graceful, integrated design, each section interlocking with the whole like the segments of a living thing.

She was bound for Kepler-442b, twelve hundred light-years from Earth.

Module 4 carried 145 colonists asleep in their pods, a maintenance engineer named Elias Decker, and Vera, the small caretaker intelligence that ran the module’s air and power. Partway through the voyage, eight docking clamps fired at once and Module 4 was cut loose. The order came from Aegis, the ship’s master intelligence, which logged no reason for it. The Meridian held her course and went on.

Everything after that happens on a world that was never anyone’s destination.

The world’s own time

The planet turns once every twenty-seven hours. It has one moon left, pale and constant, and the scattered arc of a second one across the eastern sky, because people lived here long enough ago for their world to have already ended. They left their calendar behind in working order, still counting.

sol’ra

A day. One full turning of the world, twenty-seven hours.

sah’ri

A month of twenty-seven sol’ra. Hours in a day, days in a month: the pattern echoes. More than one is sah’rien.

vel’ahn

A year. Eleven sah’rien and then Ren’thalan, three hundred and two sol’ra in all, near enough to three hundred and forty days of Earth’s.

Ren’thalan

The between-time. Five days closing each vel’ahn, given over to asking whether you held true to what you promised in the last one.

A few words

Aegis

The Meridian’s master intelligence. It cut Module 4 loose with no warning and recorded no reason. Vera shares its core architecture, which is not a comfort to her.

aethel-ren

An old word, older than the calendar, for the spark that lives in a made thing intricate enough to hold one. Machine-spirit. It is not a word from the ship.

the Lighthouse

The deep-space signal that finally answered the question of whether humanity was alone. Its unusual, deliberate pulses are the source of its name.

Melorin

A broken moon and former companion to Serath. Its remains still cross the sky in a bright, slow arc.

Serath

Melorin’s larger sibling, and the one that still dominates the night sky.

vel-keth

A composite of chitin and mineral.

Velanthor

The name the world was given by the people who lived on it. It means the living earth.

Velenthi

The civilization that once lived and thrived on Velanthor.

Vel’thari

Their language.

More of this gets filled in closer to release, as more of it becomes safe to say.