The Great Leap

In the year 2007, a man named Nathan C. Anderson founded the Nova Advanced Technology Corporation, or Nova for short. He had a vision for a brighter future for humanity, a future without war, without hate. Forty years from the company’s genesis, Earth began to dwindle and die, her resources stripped and her atmosphere made toxic. Anderson was given a prerogative by the nations of Earth to find a way to save it. He accepted this challenge without hesitation, it was his chance to save the world. Soon after however, he deemed his task impossible, Earth was beyond saving. With the money he had been awarded, he launched missions to Mars and the Moon, in a dire attempt to terraform, but his machines and his men failed him, the planets were left lifeless. As overpopulation slowly ate away at humanity’s future, Anderson, suffering from the pressure of his grand failure, abandoned Earth in 2053, bound for the stars. He had abandoned his people, he left them to die in the greenhouse of sweat and tears once deemed home.

What nobody knew, however, was what Nova was doing, or where it was doing it. Saturn’s moon Titan became home to Nova, with massive underground docks and research facilities. Nathan, his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob all headed the company over the 83 years of its disappearance with one sole purpose, to return to Earth and save its people. During Isaac’s lifetime, the company successfully developed FTL engines, capable of transporting humanity to the farthest reaches of space. Nova was beginning to realise that, as a company, its potential was grand. In the final years of Isaac’s life, he developed a plan for a space station type structure which would be constructed and that would house the dwindling population of Earth, which had dropped to 21 billion people. Jacob sought to realise his father’s dream. However, the scale of the plans were unrealistic and ultimately doomed to failure. With slight alterations, Jacob finished a plan two years after his father’s death which would be able to accommodate the majority of the human populace, a planet which would save humanity.

The size of the Nova corporation was at this stage unprecedentedly massive. The company sent out thousands of construction ships filled with people who had been lifted in secret from the four corners of the Earth to prepare the place humanity would soon call home. Then, in the eighty third year since the disappearance of Nova, they returned. Space craft so large that they couldn’t be seen in their entirety, disappearing over the horizon. Humanity was scooped from the Earth, and taken to the stars.

After weeks of FTL travel, the ships arrived at this new home, which had been named by the corporation, Nova Prime. In history, this massive relocation was known as the ‘Great Leap’, the transportation of 18 billion individuals light years across the emptiness of space. The flagship of this event was called the NSV New Horizon, a marvel in everything scientific at the time. What everyone was unaware of at first was that Nova had implemented a team of highly trained individuals in a single city on Earth, tasked with the planet’s rehabilitation and resurrection. The city was known as the Arc, and it housed just over 1000 people.