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a game of alien first contact

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On January 27th, not so many years from now, a large meteorite strikes southeastern Canada.  A plague spreads outward from the crash site, killing all life--plant, animal, human--that comes into contact.  Quarantine is imposed, but as neighboring people scramble to escape and the world governments struggle to make sense of the scale of the impending disaster, a new threat looms. 

Fire rains from the sky, scorching stone, lake and tree beneath it.  For three days light blazes down on what was once Montreal, destroying again all that once lived.  Vast shapes appear in the sky, beaming messages in strange ululating tongues, uttered by nightmarish tentacled creatures.  All over the world, military forces are rallied, and employed against these alien forces. 

The human forces are utterly defeated. The human nations await their fate at their new alien overlords.  A calm settles over the earth as its citizens await a message from their masters.

After three months, the message comes, from the same strange hissing tongues, now wrapping themselves around earthly syllables.

“We’ve come to save you…”

Over time, the whole story is told.  The Galaxy is seething with life.  Interstellar travel has been happening for untold millennia and sentient species have come into contact with other sentient species time and time again. 

With contact has come trade: economic, cultural--and biological.  Diseases have ravaged through world after world, the microbial inhabitants of one world finding weaknesses in the genetic defenses of those from another. Worlds have been emptied, opening the way for continuing devastation from domination through warfare. 

Until the Cure was found.

The Cure changes life.  It creates a common bond between new life that it finds, and those it has come from.  A universal inoculation that introduces isolated life to the viral cultures of the intermingled worlds.

Without the Cure, all life is threatened. But with the Cure… change happens.  Slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, but overtime the life one has known becomes something else.  Something other.  Other than what was and has been known.

Since interstellar space travel is needed to contact others, the interstellar community leaves newly developing worlds in innocence of their existence until the fledgling world acquires the ability on their own.  

Humanity was in quarantine, violated by the alien ship that crash landed on Earth.  The crash endangered all life on earth.  The Xsian <zis-see’-un> crew signaled their people, allowing the Xsian fleet to quickly come forward to raze the exposed population of Earth.  Given this untimely catapulting of humanity into the galactic community, the Xsians took it upon themselves to sponsor humanity. To offer them the Cure and help them connect with the interstellar species. 

However, earth turned them down.

The many nations of the earth warred and squabbled over the best course of action.  Consensus could not be formed.  Some people of the world rejected the Cure, desiring to continue the quarantine to preserve the earth as it was and had been.  Others sought to embrace this new change, wanting to join the universal community, to learn about new worlds, new technologies and societies.  Or to leave earth behind for their own reasons.

So a compromise was developed.  Earth would not take the Cure. Those who wished to remain on the planet would do so.  No traffic from off world would be allowed.  Humanity could stay in its cocoon a while longer. 

But those who wished to leave, could do so. Never to return.

A Xsian base was built on the moon.  The Lunar site is a joint human/Xsian community; a gateway for those humans who wish to travel into the universe.  To establish human colonies on different worlds.  To learn about what the galaxy holds for humanity.  To step into the unknown.