Story

The Aetheon Alliance

The Aetheon Alliance hail from Paraden. Located in a binary system Aetheons are always prepared for heat, extreme sun, eclipses, and drastic temperature drops. Don’t ask about the day and night hours in a binary system, it’s a lot.

A bright bunch, Aetheons live in a militaristic society. Aetheons have roles, and with little to no feeling, they’re content to fill those roles. The most revered of the Aetheons are the scientists. They may live hundreds of years, or more, but they all want to be a scientist. Aetheons study the universe, greater longevity, personal upgrades, other life forms, plants, and (their favorite!) space and time travel.

Most Aetheons are more cyborg than entity. They spend their ever longer lives searching for answers in science or serving those that do. Along they way they’ve developed vision enhancements, and light bending hand implants that turn ambient light into targeted lasers. However, most hope through dogged study, they can prove that Earth was real, and they ARE descendants of Earthlings.

What no one knows is the Aetheons are right. Some parts of the Space Bible are true. There was an Earth, and its residents were destroyed in a massive disaster of their own hubris. The day all technology ceased to function was the day most Earthlings did to. Their self driving cars wrecked, their communications failed, they couldn’t access their funding systems, satellites fell to Earth. It was exactly the sort of thing you don’t expect to wake up to.

Lost to time was that a single space station was somehow unaffected. Shielded from this massive EMP by space junk, the planet itself? Those astronauts weren’t sure. For a while, they watched the world burn, literally. It got ugly fast.

Knowing they needed to make quick choices, our astronaut friends packed their escape modules and set course for Mars. There had been attempts to terraform the planet before, and they’d have to make this time a success.

Shockingly, 5 astronauts arrived on Mars and were able to set up a colony there. How those 5 came to be the Aetheon Alliance in a binary system is a series of twists and turns that would surprise M. Night Shyamalan, but unbeknownst to everyone, something remains of the Earthlings.