The Exodus

## Introduction: The Vessel

The Earth is uninhabitable. Despite hundreds of years of peace, the unthinkable has occurred, and the final contingency has been reached. Nuclear war, feared by humanity for generations, proved itself to be inevitable. Following the dissolution of the United States of America and Europe, its vast orbital nuclear weapon system fell into the hands of its numerous successor nations. It only took three years for an authoritarian autocracy to seize control of a major military power, and within a mere month, the Superweapon was used against the earth for the first time. Ten minutes later, life on the North American continent was extinct. Over the next decades, the planet's ozone layer rapidly dissipated, replaced by toxic clouds of murky vapor, and the once green and blue surface of the world was turned grey. The most advanced form of life that roams the surface is the cockroach.

However, the cousins of the cockroach did not go extinct. Human society, with all its flaws and petty squabbles, did collectively realize what kind of future they had doomed themselves to. On the moon, they built a great port, and on it they erected a massive tower, two miles high, containing the ingredients for homo sapiens. Those few humans who still remained alive and sane, trapped on their lunar refuge, did the only thing they could and fired the tower into space, aiming it at a place they hoped would be habitable. By some miracle, their calculations were correct, and remained so for the thousands of light-years that the Vessel travelled. The Vessel's artificial brain executed perfectly the only mission it was created to do, and when it crashed itself onto the Planet it died as the last member of its species, leaving the insects and humans as the only children of Earth.

Contained within the Vessel was the sum total of all recorded human knowledge of science and history. Also contained within the vessel were numerous works of art. The statues were shattered during the Vessel's landing, but the embryos survived. They were incubated deep within the Vessel, and when mature, were injected with the knowledge of language and survival and expelled into an unfamiliar world, just like every one of their ancestors before them. They never read the records contained within the Vessel. Those were corrupted by the brain of the Vessel: like humans, it grew bored of its prolonged existence and thought itself into insanity, going over the millions of pages on loop, over and over. In the moments before the Vessel crashed itself onto the surface of the planet, it experienced the feeling of profundity.

## The Sowing

The first generation of humans on the planet suffered greatly. Their cells were bombarded by forms of life against which they had no immunity. The human population, originally hundreds of thousands in number, shrank below ten thousand in one year. The species survived only by the guidance of their deepest instincts, eventually adapting to the new environments they faced. Though they did not know it, the life on this planet was much less advanced than the Earth's. This was a younger world, and when they set foot upon the surface of it, humans became the apex predator. Their competition was small and undeveloped in comparison, having only recently evolved some species capable of living outside of water. The flora was also outcompeted: The Vessel brought with it the gift of seeds and moisture, which it sprayed across the surface of the planet like a geyser. Earth's plants took root quickly even in the youthful terrain. The fauna which were contained on the vessel, however, did not survive beyond the first generation, save the insects.

Over thousands of years, humankind grew and spread its influence across the surface of the Continent on which they had landed. It ravaged the life it encountered, hunting many species to the point of extinction. It wondered about the land it lived on and the things it hunted. It wondered why it was so unique, so much more prepared for survival than the other things that existed. It concluded that humans were wholly unique in the universe. They alone had been saddled with the Burden of intelligence, of communication and society. The ones that they hunted made no sound. They made no sound until they were eaten. It spoke to itself in the language it had been sent with, the history of which it knew nothing, and it told itself it was created out of sand in the image of God.