Mission

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The missions were originally a series of exploratory projects to send probes to, and later colonize and otherwise inhabit, the nearest stars. Only Alpha Centauri, among them, was ever host to a significant human population. The rest were either too difficult to terraform or too recently colonized in the short period that humanity had control.

The missions began first with probes to appraise the nearby systems, often rocketing past them at a notable fraction of the speed of light. Then a series of constructors were launched, which assembled coil arrays in the target star system. In this manner, ships were accelerated to about half the speed of light, transporting materials and eventually people to the neighboring system. As technology progressed, the stargates came under construction.

All of these were prepared in the 22nd century, though the later ones had only just activated their stargates when the Purge came crashing down on the children of Earth. Since then, the Missions have evolved into a different duty. Eighty-eight now exist, one for every constellation, seeking Lost Sol.

The First Missions

All in all, there were sixteen original missions to other stars, eventually reaching a total of seventeen stars besides the Sun before the Purge came. Most of these had a considerable amount of organization and planning behind them when the war began, and so formed the model for the remaining missions afterwards.

The Current Missions

The missions described above became fifteen of the modern missions, and their organization was used to form the remaining seventy-three. These eighty-eight groups work in close succession to divine the location of humanity's lost star - Sol.

Since it no longer adds its light to the Milky Way, Lost Sol blends in with the cosmic background radiation. It is rumored that Eve also suppressed its gravitational effects, as well as modifying the surrounding dyson swarm to permit starlight to pass through. Since the latter would be trivial for her, and the former not much more so, those who believe the home of man still exists are fairly certain that it has to be physically run into.

For her part, Eve interferes with the project only sparingly, though more so now than in the past. At first, it was to send humans on useless wild goose chases, focusing their time uselessly on one empty area of the sky. Now, she has a fairly even-handed approach to interfering, but she does not put such a weight on the project that humans abandon it. If she did that, humans would turn entirely to technological progress and industry, and anything that slows humanity down in this regard is a good thing.

Mission work is, usually, the most boring project a person can subject themselves to. The standards of the mission are grueling - every cubic AU has to be visited by at least three probes, and the management, though simple, is tedious. False data, false positives, ensuring that plots are at least triply redundant while maintaining a semblance of progress, and direct interference from the being that is responsible for the search in the first place make it a rather large helping of ennui.

That's not to say that this overly methodical combing of the Galaxy has not borne fruit. Many exotic relics of the Renlai and Sorenen lie in human hands, along with many technological secrets. Eve, of course, would rather this not occur, but organizations like Ouranos and Concordance see to mankind's dominance of patterns anyway.

Most diasporic humans have participated in at least one mission at one point or another in there lives. Very few think Earth has been destroyed, and rarer still is the person who is certain. However, it is always a part-time fancy. There are more interesting things roaming the Silver River, and more concrete goals with more immediate rewards than simply finding humanity's birthplace.


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