First came the Drive. 

Officially, it was the Albucierre-White-Singh drive, or the AWS. Alcubierre had done the initial math. White had figured out how to simplify the equations and take the drive from completely impossible by any means to just barely possible in this Universe. 

But it was Singh – Ravinder Singh – who invented the math that showed that it could all be done with existing technology – but only barely. 

Then came the Pax Aster, a golden era of peace and cooperation between all the bickering factions that humanity had split into once we had finally conquered of our solar system 

Once Singh had made his famous presentation to the Pan Planetary Union, seen by billions all over the Sol System, there was no turning back. Even the most fractious and difficult of leaders did not dare risk being seen as i any sense impeding humanity’s destiny in the stars. Humanity was, for the next twenty years, as one. 

People debated the methods, but no one debated the goal. 

Then came Ascension Day. Humanity has never seen such a spectacle. The space around the Test Plant glittered with spaceships covered in sparkling decorations. Low density plasmoid fireworks invented just for the occasion formed spectacular shapes in empty space before shimmering into nothing. The “stands” were enormous loggia floating in space and in each one, the party of the century was in full swing. 

This day had been twenty hard but productive years in the making, and humanity was going to celebrate the hell out of every way they could. 

Then came the Test. 

With enormous fanfare, the chairperson of the Top Council for Humanity in Space pressed the button that fired up the AWS drive on the great ship the Star of Humanity for the first time. 

And as the great drive flared into prismatic glory, a great and mighty cheer arose from those assembled. They had done it! 

The cheer died in their throats, however, when the great ship simply blinker out of existence. 

No warning. No flash. One moment it was there, and the next it was not. The loss was total. All the astronauts, all the equipment, all the scientests and nobles and celebrity guests, gone in an instant. 

And in that moment, humanity’s united spirit was crushed. 

Recriminations filled the Tanglenet. Everybody blamed everyone else. A billion conspiracy theories sprang into life overnight, and the spirit that had united humanity was now spoken of exclusively in bitter, recriminating tones. People needed someone to blame. 

So they turned to the most obvious suspect : Revinder Singh himself. Surely he must have known that this was possible. Surely the genius behind this whole thing must have had some idea that HIS drive was not entirely safe. Surely this was all, ultimately, his fault. 

So the Great Genius was dragged into the spotlight and made to ask questions by a PPU panel of prosecutors, scientists, spiritual leaders, and prominent citizens charged with the holy mission of Getting To The Bottom Of What Really Happened. 

And after putting up a token, nay symbolic defense claiming innocence, the Great Genius admitted that he had, indeed, seen the possibility of such an event, but had considered it so improbable that it was not worth mentioning at all. 

This answer satisfied nobody, and what was left of the cooperative spirit in humanity died a messy and terrible death. The PPU disintegrated as a functioning political force almost instantly, and to be someone associated directly with the Great Project quickly meant to be in fear for your life. 

The people wanted blood, and they didn’t care how they got it. 

Adding to the chaos was the fact that a large percentage of humanity’s top leadership had been aboard the Star of Humanity when it disappeared, and the power vaccuums that created destroyed all they touched as groups of angry and violent people clashed as they tried to fill the void. 

This was the Interregnum, and it was to last fifteen long and tortuous years. Of the 380 billion humans alive on Ascension Day, almost a billion would die in the Faction Wars, and billions more would see their worlds shattered by wars that turned them into refugees and tore their familes apart. 

But then came the Pilots. 

Experiments conducted in hush-hush secret revealed that roughly one person in 150 million had the potential to learn to guide an AWS vessel in those crucial moments of startup and takeoff (and shutdown and arrival) so that there was no chance of them “blinking out”. 

So then came the Hunt. It was as thorough as it was brutal. People were tested on masse and nobody gave two thoughts to concepts like “permission”. Thousands were turned into vegetables or lunatics by the process, but eventually humanity had its 2500 Pilots. 

And suddenly, our trek to the stars resumed. The Pilots were treated like pampered pets, given anything they wanted except control over their own lives. They went where they were told and did as they were instructed. 

And humanity began to coalesce once more. The factions didn’t disappear but they became both larger and less contentious. A rough kind of system wide government known ironically as the Pilot’s Union formed to regulate how this fantastic new power was to be used. 

So then came the Seeding. Human colonies spread to nearby stars, slowly at first but rapidly growing into great fertile waves of expansion began. Within 25 years, there were as many humans living outside the Sol System as within it, and good ol’ Sol took on the air of The Old Country. 

But this came at a cost of a vast reduction in human freedom.  People labored for the new bosses by the billions without any thought of being paid because to ask for pay was seen as unpatriotic. Democracy was also swept aside in the rise of fascism. The very notion that the average person should have a say in anything was cruelly mocked as “naive”. 

But then there were the Pilots. And the Pilots had a Plan. 

The Plan was simple in concept. They would play the part of dutiful, spoiled, arrogant pets for as long as it took for the entire civilization of humanity to become completely dependent on their labor and completely forget the very notion of pilots as people with free will, and then they would go on strike as one and force reform on the empire of humanity. 

And that’s how we came to have the society we have today, children. 

And the man behind that Plan? 

It was none other than Ravinder Singh himself. 

But that’s a story for anothet time.