The Discovery of World-0

The Probe and Mission to Urun-10037

From the earliest days of human interstellar exploration, it has proven most efficient to locate potential planets for colonization by telescopic means, and then to send a robot probe to evaluate each planet by direct observation. In the case of the star Urun-10037, the probe was almost not sent: observations gave conflicting data, for it seemed that a suitably-sized planet was indeed in orbit around the star, but its albedo was (practically) zero, meaning that it could only be dark mineral with no atmosphere. Propitiously, resources for the observing station at that time were running high, as was curiosity. The probe was dispatched in 6350 A.D. from the human colony world of Errex, a mere three light-years from Urun-10037. Needless to say, when the near-flyby data stream reached Errex in 6363 A.D. (the probe was an inexpensive, low-acceleration drone), a manned mission was put together immediately. And so, three years later, humans arrived at World-0.

The tale of Commander Gustar Sepp's mission to World-0 -- the first human entry into the Lattice -- is the stuff of legend, and cannot be recounted here in appropriately respectful detail. Indeed, enough has been recorded about those halcyon days of discovery, exploration, and adventure. Suffice it to say that the import of the event did not escape Sepp's attention, and a full effort of colonization ensued. Fourteen years later (long after Sepp's tragic martyrdom), the men and women on World-0 cracked the secret of the Teegs. At that precise moment, the Lattice was discovered, and human history changed forever.

The Discovery of the Lattice

Though the first encounters with alien intelligence caused great uprisings in religious and philosophical ideologies, they were nothing compared to the strife caused by news of the Lattice. For the first time, humankind was struck directly in the face with the existence of a power far beyond any physical comprehensibility, but nonetheless a power firmly rooted in such mundane endeavours as the creation of iron and oxygen and water, the transfer of power by lepticity and photicity for direct applications, and concern for the development of living space. Those who built the Lattice were not any sort of life as had ever been come upon before, for their conquering of science reached far beyond understanding ... but neither were they gods, for they clearly dwelt, at least in part, in the physical Universe, with physical bodies. This appearance of a middle ground between religion and technology drove a traumatic wedge into the human psyche (blame for the Galactic War occasionally falls upon the Lattice, rather than the Veritadeo movement); but of course, though controversy raged, it did not hinder our exploitation of the Lattice, in the least.