Episode 1

This episode establishes a starting location and some of the characters of the first half of the series. It begins with a prologue detailing the destruction of the Earth, and humanity's flight through the portal under Istanbul.

## The End of the World

In 2019, an observatory in South America picks up a gigantic object on a collision course with Earth. It's discovered that the object, when it impacts, will utterly destroy the planet. This will not be a dino-killing impact. It will be an impact that reduces the surface of the planet to slag and throws it out of its stable orbit.

The scientists take their findings to Amsterdam, to an annual summit between the major superpowers, the Commonwealth and Empire. However, political backbiting takes precedence over actually solving the problem, wasting far too much time.

The scientists of both nations band together and send out a message to the world at large, bypassing proper channels in an act of desperation. The scientists are arrested, but the effects of their action are already being felt. The populace demand action to stop the planetoid hurtling towards the planet, and, not wanting to deal with riots, their respective governments back down and start working on their own solutions individually, though still refusing to pool resources and ideas.

Channels of communication are cut, and the Commonwealth and Empire lapse into silence. The Empire attempts to destroy the planetoid with an Armageddon-style mission to nuke it, but fails when the ship's targeting vector is off, and the vessel winds up drifting off into deep space with its life support already running low. The Commonwealth attempts to build a self-sufficient moon base that would hopefully survive the destruction of Earth, but the base falls into a cave-in, destroying it and killing its workers. The United Provinces successfully build a self-sufficient underwater city in Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the oceans of Earth, but it vanishes without a trace shortly after completion. Other attempts - underground bunkers and a generation ship - meet similar failure.

The Athena project, a United Provinces spaceship sent to Mars, successfully deposits a hundred humans on the surface in cryosleep that will last for 2000 years, but they have no way to wake them up. A powerful transmitter is set up in hopes of the ship being found by some civilization which has the technology to revive the human survivors, but space is vast, and there's no guarantee that any aliens will pick up the transmission, or that they will be willing to revive the humans even if they do find them.

Earth falls deeper into darkness, descending towards anarchy and decadence.

Istanbul falls into a massive sinkhole, revealing a vast, ancient vault under the city, which contains an object that appears to be a gateway of some kind. Commonwealth scientists begin to study the object cautiously, accompanied by a team of politicians, though the Commonwealth is unwilling to allow anyone to step through it.

11 months from the end, a Lithuanian engineer sneaks past the guards and through the portal, calling out the politicians before he steps through it, telling them that "if [he has] to die, it will be on [his] own terms". Other scientists and engineers follow suit, rushing through the portal after him. Others demand the military cordon be removed to let people choose for themselves whether or not they want to go through the portal. Scientists from Beijing reason that a chance at survival is better than certain death, and to spur the diplomatic contingent into action they record a message detailing the gateway and threaten to broadcast it via satellite to the populace.

The Commonwealth Assembly organize an official evacuation through the portal, beginning the Exodus.

It's realized by some people waiting in line to reach the portal that the people waiting with them are all from the Commonwealth and that Imperial citizens are noticeably absent. Some concerned citizens get off a message to the Imperial government, who, as it turns out, the Commonwealth leadership had decided not to inform of the Gateway's existence. This leads to the Earth's final war, as Victoria VIII orders Imperial soldiers to push towards Istanbul to clear a path for her citizens to reach the gateway.

On the last day, a young girl from the Caucasus mountains is carried by the movement of the crowd pushing towards the Gateway. She is pushed up towards the portal as the Earth is torn apart and leaps through the portal just before the shockwave arrives and then is whisked away through the Gateway. She awakens on Ortus, greeted by the First Exile, that Lithuanian engineer who started the Exodus. She sees a town down in the valley below and looks around at the desolate landscape. It looks familiar to her, having grown up in the cold mountains of the Caucasus. She realizes that the portal has closed, presumably due to its counterpart on the other side being destroyed, and that she is the last person to escape Earth. The Last Exile.

Holed up in the first city on Ortus - Wiladat Jadida, Arabic for "New Birth," many humans starve or freeze to death. To prevent chaos, the refugees are split into hundreds of groups and set off in different directions across the inhospitable landscape of Ortus. Some succeed, finding networks of geothermal caves with existing ecosystems within them, capable of supporting human life and offering shelter from the elements, or encountering animals that could be hunted or tamed and domesticated. But some groups would simply vanish. Eventually the population would stabilize, then begin to grow again.

Humanity entered a period of existing only in scattered subterranean colonies, with only limited travel and communication between them. 21 years later, the colonies reunited, officially naming their planet Ortus (Rising in Latin) and the L-class star it orbited Aasha (Hope in Hindi) and forming themselves into the Ortus Council of Nations.

## Chapter 1 - Per Aspera ad Astra

### Middle Interlude

*At the launch ceremony for the ships that will construct Ortus Spaceport, on January 1, 2200, Chancellor Drahoslav Tesar speaks on behalf of the science council. He gives a speech on human history, calling out their ancestors for their failure in the handling of the planetoid and the Exodus. He says that their lack of unity was what caused their downfall and that humanity can't afford to make the same mistakes twice. Humans have been given a second chance, he says, and they should not squander it.*

### Welcome to the Aasha System

While Ortus spaceport is being constructed, Mahu goes over his mechanical setup for the LP, including the set of traits that he is using to represent the way humans have adapted to the new world, such as their species-wide agoraphobia due to taking shelter in caves for over a century-and-a-half, or their loss of resistance to heat and development of natural antifreeze in their bloodstreams due to their establishment of a symbiotic relationship with fungal microbes living in those caves, among other adaptations.

He also goes over the Ortus Council of Nations' system of government, ethics, policies, and civics, as well as introducing some of the leaders who will serve as characters in the series, such as the Science Council, Drahoslav Tesar, and Prime Minister Takumi Ishii.

### Ending Interlude

*Professor Aadhira Tanwar and Chancellor Drahoslav Tesar discuss the logistics and PR aspects of the newly-constructed Ortus Spaceport. Public opinion is more or less entirely in favor of the Expanse Project, and the 30,000 civilian postings on board the spaceport were completely swamped with applicants within 60 seconds of the request for applications going up. Tesar asks what happened to the other 10,000 civilian postings, and Tanwar tells him that they're temporarily filled by extra technicians from Nestor Lachinov's engineering department, overseeing final work on the station's artificial gravity generators and that those posts will open up again once that work is complete.*

*The Chancellor reads over the dossiers of some of the people Tanwar selected to be sent to the spaceport and pulls one out at random. He expresses doubt over the man, and Tanwar, being a genius polymath with a near-eidetic memory, is able to immediately give him the entirety of the man's name, life story, and her reasoning behind sending him.*

*The Chancellor briefly bemoans the comparative lack of efficiency on the political side of things and the difficulty involved in getting a large number of politicians to unite on something. Tanwar jokingly suggests pointing Roman Poniewski at the diplomatic corps and having him bore them into a stupor with a lecture until they agree to behave.*

1. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw
2. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=2m47s
3. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=4m5s
4. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=6m42s
5. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=7m52s
6. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=8m14s
7. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=10m47s
8. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=12m58s
9. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=14m50s
10. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=18m14s
11. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=25m50s
12. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=31m5s
13. ↑ https://youtu.be/FCU2rRBBkQw?t=44m